A better search experience in the new platform

[VeselinaPeykova]

One of the typical complaints by newcomers is that they were unable to find the content by searching the forum.

Currently I alternate between the popular custom google search engine and another one I made for search.sap.com, which gives more options for filtering results than the default one.

I tried to search for content in beta and I believe there is a space for improvement:

Option 1: search from here: https://answers.sap.com/index.html

Searching for RV_INVOICE_CREATE

https://answers.sap.com/search.html?f=&type=question+OR+kbentry&redirect=search%2Fsearch&sort=releva...

The result is internal error

Option 2:

Visit the community archive. This means that the user needs to search in discussions and documents separately, because usually you don't know where you can find the most relevant information.

Option 2.1 - Discussions:

Browse by topic can be useful sometimes, but in certain cases - e.g. RV_INVOICE_CREATE it can be in SD, SALES,ABAP development, etc.

Search result for RV_INVOICE_CREATE in discussions:

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/search?searchTerm=rv_invoice_create

Result:

There is no option to filter/sort the results by the user and sometimes the list can be very long. Can we get here sort by date, additional filters by tag, author, filter by date range etc?

Option 2.1 - Documents:

https://archive.sap.com/documents/search?searchTerm=rv_invoice_create

The result list will be probably not that big, but still some filters will be nice to have.

Option 3 - landing page search:

https://onedx.find400.sap.com/s#t=rv_invoice_create&n=1&p=default&repo=srh

This will be the one I expect to use in most cases as a custom search engine in Firefox, unfortunately the results can be confusing for many people

• Filtering by 208 results in internal error, filtering by Vf208 - produces a result. I assume that there is a limitation how many tags can be shown there, so probably it makes sense to get the list of the primary tags and after that, ideally, to have the option to filter further by other tags.
• There is a date shown in the list of results - e.g. May,13 for  http://archive-qa.sap.com/discussions/thread/700707, but it is probably the date of migration and not the discussion, so when you try to filter by last year, it will not be shown.
• When I filter by Enterprise Resource planning I get another list of tags, containing invoicing and invoice. I expect that the list of similar tags can grow very fast and this will make searching more difficult in the future.

I understand that the idea is that people should use only meaningful tags, but I am skeptical about that except (maybe) the primary ones. Who and how will control that - moderators, forum users, additional restrictions?

[moshenaveh · Accepted solution]

Hello Veselina,

Thanks a lot for your input.

1. I get the same behavior when seraching in https://answers.sap.com/index.html . Former Member Can you please confirm that this is a bug?

2. Having filters in Archive is a good idea and I've added it to our feedback list http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-62882

3. Can you please try to search now and see if it still gives the same result?

Thanks a lot,

Moshe

[moshenaveh · Accepted solution]

Let's ping to provide input on idea # 2

Regards,

Moshe

[JasonLax · Accepted solution]

Hi,

RE #2, the archive does not contain meta data such as the product or topic for the content. Therefore, there's nothing to classify & filter with.  For this to happen, the archive would need to be populated with the metadata so that it can be discovered by the site search crawler. 

I agree this would be a nice feature and it was proposed before but without the metadata nothing can be done.

Jason