Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 127 posts

Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#1
The title says it all. To me, the most important component of a wiki is search. With that said, why is confluence wiki search basically unusable?

(by unusable, I mean I can never find the page I am looking for when I search. Basically, I have to maintain my own wiki of important links I may need to reference in the future)

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#2
Yes it only finds you crap results. Not sure why they have the most naive search algorithm out there. Maybe good search needs more AI and CPU power than we think.

Maybe this is something google should take on. A search plugin for Confluence where google crawlers logs in from time to time for internal crawling to enable non-public teach request on that data. That boost knowledge workers efficiency a lot. I hope somebody from Google reads this and takes on the challenge. I'm sure companies would pay a lot for this.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#6
So I am interested in this space. There are some alternatives out there but I suspect companies will be concerned with letting a 3rd party have access to the data needed. If you are interested in this space and would be willing to chat with me about what you're looking for OR what you are currently using I'd love to chat! My email is my username at gmail.com

Some existing tooling:

Google cloud search has a confluence connector https://developers.google.com/cloud-search/docs/connector-di...

Elastic workplace search has a connector. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/workplace-search/current/wor...

Lessonly had / had a thing called Obie https://www.lessonly.com/blog/how-to-search-better-in-conflu...

Raytion https://www.raytion.com/connectors/raytion-confluence-connec...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#7

Yes it only finds you crap results. Not sure why they have the most naive search algorithm out there. Maybe good search needs more AI and CPU power than we think. Maybe this is something google should take on. A search plugin for Confluence where google crawlers logs in from time to time for internal crawling to enable non-public teach request on that data. That boost knowledge workers efficiency a lot. I hope somebo…

This is a thing that exists already for Google Cloud Search

https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1212945/google-cloud-...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#8
post #3

Try gmail. More than a decade on and still no partial word match.

Gmail produces by far the best search results for me (comparing to apple mail and thunderbird) and makes me reach for it regularly for search alone, which I find pretty annoying. If there is anything better out there I am all ears.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#9
Most search engines are pretty bad because the developers of most search engines don't do any work to improve relevance.

This methodology works

https://ccc.inaoep.mx/~villasen/bib/AN%20OVERVIEW%20OF%20EVA...

and I used it to tune up the relevance of a search engine for patents to the point where users could immediately perceive that it worked better than other products.

After I worked on that I wound up talking to the developers and/or marketing people for many enterprise search engines and few of them, if any, did any kind of formal benchmarking of relevance.

People at one firm told me that they used to go to TREC conferences because they thought it got them visibility but that they decided it didn't so they quit going.

A message I got repeatedly was that these firms thought that the people who bought the search engines didn't care much about relevance, but they did care about there being 200 or more plug-ins to import data from various sources.

In principle the tuning is unique to the text corpus. One reason for that is that there is a balancing act of having a search engine that prefers small documents (they have spiky vectors that look more like query vectors) or large documents (they have so many words they match everything.) Different corpuses have different distributions of document sizes, not to mention different distributions of words that appear.

Few organizations are willing to do the work to tune up a search engine (you have to decide about the relevance of 10,000+ document hits), but I've had the experience that you can beat the pants off the defaults even using a generic tuning. For instance that patent search engine was tuned up against the GOV2 corpus instead of a patent corpus. A small patent corpus showed us we were on the right track, however.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

#10
The good news here is that the Confluence API is actually really good, and very easy to integrate with.

I wrote a custom search engine that worked by running on cron, pulling in all of the content from Confluence and writing it into a SQLite table with SQLite full-text search enabled (using https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#...), then sticking a https://datasette.io/ interface in front of it.

Post reply on HN