Thank god we have Google

[JL23]

The picture explains all - you feel like Hansel and Gretel - left alone in wood, the way is just illusion

I searched for OMSX transaction, as I knew that it was a frequent answer for a certain problem, but I could only find 1 item in the wood.

And https://onedx.find.sap.com/s#t=OMSX%20&n=1&p=default&repo=srh is even worse as it shows 1.9 K hits and has not a single relevant hit in the initial page, it just shows results with the word OMS instead of OMSX

And then use Google for the same, and easily more than hundred related results:

[JL23]

I use the quotation marks quite often if I look for a phrase, but honestly I do not expect to use this approach for a single word

[VeselinaPeykova]

Unfortunately somebody decided to add fuzzy search as an improvement - and we all know how well that went with SAP One Support Launchpad...

The really fun part is if you search for OMS2.

According to SAP's documentation:
Search engine results page

1 - Search Box - enter your Search Term and click the Search Button. Please note, only search term in quotation marks "term" or terms including numbers i.e. C5203971 generate exact search results.

My expectation was that OMS2 generates exact search results. In this case there should be no difference in the number of results if I search for "OMS2" or if I search for OMS2.

Sure...

OMS2 result:

https://onedx.find.sap.com/s#t=OMS2&n=1&p=default&repo=srh

And this is for "OMS2":

https://onedx.find.sap.com/s#t=%22OMS2%22&n=1&p=default&repo=srh

And they removed result sorting by date from the search page, because somebody broke it and it was reported as a bug.

Is this how simplification works?

[JL23]

OMSX search with quotes "OMSX" does not return any better result than without quotes, if you search from questions and answers:

[VeselinaPeykova]

You cannot switch off the fuzzy option in Find Questions&Answers. I am not even sure if we can compare the results to onedx.find.sap.com, because this one here uses some filters for search type question or kbentry, and I don't see a kbentry/discussion distinction in the onedx search filters.

Exact was never designed to work for Find Questions&Answers. On top of that, this search is useless for people, who have Firefox or IE11, because you get only one page of results (in my case 15 from the archive out of 1897 if I search for OMS2😞

https://answers.sap.com/search.html?q=oms2

It gets a lot worse if you have more than one word as a search term- e.g. item category.

In my opinion, SAP does not handle well fuzzy search (Google has more sophisticated algorithms to determine similar results), I consider the search from Find Questions&Answers field as the least reliable of all possible options.

In find.sap.com the search for exact term works as expected - you get the same number of results if you search for OMS2 or "OMS2".

[Former Member]

Thank you very much for the feedback also from my side! It helps tremendously to fine tune the system settings and parameters. We have just lowered the search fuzziness a bit - now getting the exact results for 'OMSX':

I hope this is a good compromise still tolerating some orthographic variations (which are actually the reason why we do not make an exact search by default).

[JL23]

Better, but not complete.

Google has 99 hits for this search term: OMSX site:sap.com

the search here just 19

On the first result page from Google I found 3 discussions that are not available in the OneDX search:

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/3522687

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/3158378

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/1360580

Why does SAP not find its own content?

[Former Member]

Thanks again - I see where the problem comes from... we will work on a correction

[former_member186338]

Not searching in replies 🙂 ?

[JasonLax]

The number is closer to 80: Results from scn.sap.com are still appearing in Google search results and are duplicate.

[JasonLax · Accepted solution]

This is good feedback. Honestly, I didn't fully know about this and the 16,000 other SAP tcodes (OMSE OMSF OMSG OMSL OMSL2 OMSL_DI OMSP OMSPCUST OMSR OMSS).

I'll be honest: Site search does not employ AI so all these rules and learning needs to be applied manually. So this feedback is helpful and I'm working on how best to solve this in the short and long term.

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

Just being curious: This different search experience came with the new platform. Is it the database that causes a different interpretation?

[JasonLax · Accepted solution]

No, the database didn't change much. Of course, the structure of the content across all the new platforms did. The biggest factor is likely the level of fuzziness and that help.sap.com is not part of the index yet.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

Why do you guys even bother with SAP search? It's exercise in futility. I just use Google all the time, unless I have to search for the notes in Launchpad.

[VeselinaPeykova]

The exact option in sap search worked quite well, in the old SCN I liked the possibility to apply additional filtering after the initial search - by date range, author, forum space. By the way, if you use exact option in the SAP One Support Launchpad, you also get better results.

And I just found out that the search in SCN forums from SAP One Support Launchpad is wrong - it returns the results only from the old SCN and not from the new Q&A (not that I ever used this option).

I am starting to ask myself - is there any reliable search functionality, which is actually working? Except for Google, of course, which is harder to verify.

[JL23]

I liked the old SCN search with the filters and had no real need for Google or the custom Google search. I switched to Google when the SCN search was moved on HANA and the filters were gone.

But as a moderator you can get into trouble quick if you tell a user that he failed to search and it turns out that the search failed to return useful results.

The SAP search should at least return "some" useful results for people who have already used Yahoo, Google or Bing without needing a 2000$ training in a SAP Education Center to understand SAPs maverick search.

[former_member186338]

I can confirm that SAP search is not working correctly.

[JasonLax]

Thanks for this feedback. This is a good example of where we need to make more adjustments to the "fuziness" factor and I will ask this to be investigated. What puzzles me is why didn't you search for "OMSX transaction"? We've seen that satisfaction with site search increases significantly when the query contains at least 2 terms in a query.

Google sets the bar very high and it's a challenge to get site search to reach that, let alone "match" the results 1:1 as suggested. So I like to think that they complement each other.

You can always limit Google search results to SAP.com by adding "site:sap.com" to your query as you've shown or try this Custom Google Search (non-suported) project: http://bit.ly/1dx-search

[VeselinaPeykova]

I cannot speak for others, but usually when I refer to OMSX, OMLY, VOFM or other well-known transactions, I don't specify in my answer that this is a transaction - the assumption is that the person is aware that this is a transaction and not a table, for example. This is similar to mentioning "Windows 7" - you don't say often "Windows 7 operating system" to a colleague, not even to a client. Another motive not to use OMSX transaction as a search term combination is, that instead of typing the word transaction, many would just type tcode.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but if you type OMSX transaction, as an end user, you have no way to set the relative weight of the search terms separately, which means OMSX and transaction will have the same importance in searches. If we use fuzzy search, first we would get the results where we have both terms mentioned, then we will get the ones, where we have one of these two, sorted by page rank. "Transaction" is a very common term, which means that OMSX - only entries (which are more important to us) will be buried into the list of not so useful results, where only transaction is mentioned, but they have a higher number of page views or recent updates.
Here is a more realistic example: you are interested in the combination of OMSX and vendor. If you type both words without quotes, you will get at the top a bunch of results, where the word vendor is mentioned and some variation of typing OMSX, like OMSG. I would type instead "OMSX" vendor - this would filter out the OMSX variations, but I would probably do this after typing "OMSX" and seeing that there are too many results.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

Oh boy, Google is broken now too. I was searching for an SCN post where someone asked for a screenshot of activity stream from the old SCN. Google -> screenshot activity stream SCN site:sap.com found an item that clearly included the text I was searching for but the link was not right. So I re-searched with the exact string and got only the same result:

This link shows a huge list of questions, it also switches me to a Swiss profile and changes language to French (I guess compliments of "suisse" part). However, the specific question is nowhere in sight there.

So I resorted to the SCN search and for the same exact string "screenshots of the activity stream on the old SCN?" (with quotation marks) it found nothing. But after I removed all the marks it found the question (and a bunch of non-related stuff, of course). Exhibit A and B:

Really hard to blame others for not searching these days...

[JL23]

Google just captured what it found on a page which was "visible" to Google at a certain time.

It is the overview page with all content, which also has coffee corner content among them, but coffee corner itself is hidden for Google, so the links are re-directed to the overview

By the way, my search would have been more suitable for you:

[VeselinaPeykova]

For onedx.find.sap.com searches - remove just the question mark, keep the rest in " ".

https://onedx.find.sap.com/s#t=%22screenshots%20of%20the%20activity%20stream%20on%20the%20old%20SCN%...

The current question is not indexed properly yet:

And, as part of the simplification, you don't get the total number of results, because would be confusing.

As for the custom Google search - this is shown as ... wiki?

There is some indexing problem with this question, I think, I could not get it to appear in duckduckgo, startpage and disconnect.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

You say "indexing problem", I say "conspiracy"! 🙂

[VeselinaPeykova]

These are not mutually exclusive. 🙂

[willi_eimler]

Why are you crying?

This is the new cost effective way to launch projects. The stupid ones that want's to test before launch are cowards!. Every manager tells you quality is nice to have, but not really required! This is the cost effective 20:80 approach! 80% of the work is done, the rest is to expensive:)