4 ms·

The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible. And no amou

by jatins 5y ago

The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible. And no amount of documentation solves this because documentation is useless if it can't present itself at the time of need. Because rest assured, no once (including me) can find anything using the horrible Confluence search.

onion2k 5y ago
I treat the awfulness of Confluence's search as a feature. It forces me to organize and cross-reference documentation.
- sdoering 5y ago
  Interesting take on it. I like it. But sadly this solves it for the people relying on your documentation. Not for you if you rely on anyone else's documentation if they don't act accordingly.
pferde 5y ago
Confluence search is alright. The problem with Confluence is the undisciplined people who mess up their spaces to the point where the search comes up with too many mostly duplicate results, where you can't be sure which one is the latest valid version. At my job, we use Confluence extensively, with dozens if not hundreds of spaces, and in some spaces, searching for something is a delight, while in others it is impossible to find anything without already knowing their byzantine structure. Usually, the "good" spaces are ones with one or three "custodians" who mercilessly impose a sane structure upon the space. The "bad" spaces are always those where dozens of people create articles and sections as they see fit, without any coordination.
- jatins 5y ago
  > ... knowing their byzantine structure. If you need to know the structure to search, IMO the search experience is broken. Most searchers want to type topic related words and expect useful results.
  - pferde 5y ago
    Yes, but that's because the space contains so many duplicate or almost duplicate articles that search results have no chance of being good. I see the problem in the searched content, not in the search engine itself.
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      The internet also contains "so mamy duplicate or almost duplicate" articles, and yet Google can provide a useful search for Internet articles. You're telling me it's somehow impossible to achieve the same thing for a company's intra - even though it has several orders of magnitude fewer articles to index? One quick and easy way to improve Confluence's search would be to rank often-visited articles higher than rarely-visited articles.
      - pferde 5y ago
        I would hope that going by popularity is something a search engine WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT DO in a corporate setting. This is a completely different scenario than what we have on the public WWW, so unless your corporation has a situation where people maliciously copy articles from others, trying to pass them off as their own content, in which case the search engine quality is the least of your problems. :) Anyway, as I've already stated, Confluence spaces which are well looked after and are not allowed to get cluttered are a delight to search in, and as a bonus also a delight to just browse through. P.S. Google Search results are often lousy and full of low quality results anyway, I'm not sure mentioning it makes your point as well as you think it does. As everywhere - crap goes in, crap comes out. :)
        baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Personally I haven't seen "well looked after" Confluence spaces. I have experience with 4 different companies that used Confluence for their infra, and in my experience it has always been a mess. The reason I advocated for ranking by popularity is that those messy Confluence pages are filled to the brim with obsolete outdated articles that nobody intentionally visits. For example, in many firms people post meeting notes to Confluence. So you have 10 000 pages of quality "notes from project abc weekly meeting 5.4.2014". Now, imagine yourself searching a Confluence space like that. You type in a particular phrase, and there is a perfect match in meeting notes from 2017, a perfect match from preliminary design document from 2013, etc. These results constantly drown out the actual pages you are searching for, which are typically more actively-updated, more recent pages. It would be a huge improvement to rank these pages higher purely based on their popularity.
bregma 5y ago
Search is great if you already know the answer (all search does is match answers to pages). Search is not a substitute for good documentation. Neither is "read the code" or "you should just know", which are the most common answers I get from developers.
xondono 5y ago
> The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. This is a symptom of bad communication. I faced some of these issues in a company, and the best solution we found was creating a massive “FAQ” single page where (browser) search could get you what you wanted, and a firm policy that any question asked should end with a modification to the document. All questions had to include the search terms used to find the answer, and if it was a “failure to find”, those search terms would be included in the “related tags” section of the question for next time.
justin_oaks 5y ago
> I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible I find some people just don't know (or care about) the right way to use Slack. They need to be taught "Hey, don't bother 100 people in this channel for your niche question." Some are oblivious, some don't care about other people. Either way someone needs to pull them aside and say "stop it". Having management that allows that to continue indicates an unhealthy organization.
- quesera 5y ago
  Slack actually pops a dialog when you message @channel or @here. Message says, e.g.: Using @here pings everyone in the channel who's currently online. It's a bit noisy! Are you sure you want to send this? [Edit Message] [Send] Of course it doesn't always help!
  - justin_oaks 5y ago
    Good point. I use @channel or @here so infrequently that I didn't remember that.
OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
How did they make the Confluence search be so horrible? I once searched a page title without noticing I was already at that page, and it couldn't find it. I literally copied the title in and it still didn't find it. truly an awesome (as in awe and fear inspiring) piece of software.
- geodel 5y ago
  It might be an effort to make Confluence truly enterprise grade.

by jatins 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

I treat the awfulness of Confluence's search as a feature. It forces me to organize and cross-reference documentation.

sdoering 5y ago
Interesting take on it. I like it. But sadly this solves it for the people relying on your documentation. Not for you if you rely on anyone else's documentation if they don't act accordingly.

pferde 5y ago

Confluence search is alright. The problem with Confluence is the undisciplined people who mess up their spaces to the point where the search comes up with too many mostly duplicate results, where you can't be sure which one is the latest valid version. At my job, we use Confluence extensively, with dozens if not hundreds of spaces, and in some spaces, searching for something is a delight, while in others it is impossible to find anything without already knowing their byzantine structure. Usually, the "good" spaces are ones with one or three "custodians" who mercilessly impose a sane structure upon the space. The "bad" spaces are always those where dozens of people create articles and sections as they see fit, without any coordination.

jatins 5y ago
> ... knowing their byzantine structure. If you need to know the structure to search, IMO the search experience is broken. Most searchers want to type topic related words and expect useful results.
- pferde 5y ago
  Yes, but that's because the space contains so many duplicate or almost duplicate articles that search results have no chance of being good. I see the problem in the searched content, not in the search engine itself.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    The internet also contains "so mamy duplicate or almost duplicate" articles, and yet Google can provide a useful search for Internet articles. You're telling me it's somehow impossible to achieve the same thing for a company's intra - even though it has several orders of magnitude fewer articles to index? One quick and easy way to improve Confluence's search would be to rank often-visited articles higher than rarely-visited articles.
    - pferde 5y ago
      I would hope that going by popularity is something a search engine WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT DO in a corporate setting. This is a completely different scenario than what we have on the public WWW, so unless your corporation has a situation where people maliciously copy articles from others, trying to pass them off as their own content, in which case the search engine quality is the least of your problems. :) Anyway, as I've already stated, Confluence spaces which are well looked after and are not allowed to get cluttered are a delight to search in, and as a bonus also a delight to just browse through. P.S. Google Search results are often lousy and full of low quality results anyway, I'm not sure mentioning it makes your point as well as you think it does. As everywhere - crap goes in, crap comes out. :)
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Personally I haven't seen "well looked after" Confluence spaces. I have experience with 4 different companies that used Confluence for their infra, and in my experience it has always been a mess. The reason I advocated for ranking by popularity is that those messy Confluence pages are filled to the brim with obsolete outdated articles that nobody intentionally visits. For example, in many firms people post meeting notes to Confluence. So you have 10 000 pages of quality "notes from project abc weekly meeting 5.4.2014". Now, imagine yourself searching a Confluence space like that. You type in a particular phrase, and there is a perfect match in meeting notes from 2017, a perfect match from preliminary design document from 2013, etc. These results constantly drown out the actual pages you are searching for, which are typically more actively-updated, more recent pages. It would be a huge improvement to rank these pages higher purely based on their popularity.

bregma 5y ago

Search is great if you already know the answer (all search does is match answers to pages). Search is not a substitute for good documentation. Neither is "read the code" or "you should just know", which are the most common answers I get from developers.

xondono 5y ago

> The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. This is a symptom of bad communication. I faced some of these issues in a company, and the best solution we found was creating a massive “FAQ” single page where (browser) search could get you what you wanted, and a firm policy that any question asked should end with a modification to the document. All questions had to include the search terms used to find the answer, and if it was a “failure to find”, those search terms would be included in the “related tags” section of the question for next time.

justin_oaks 5y ago

> I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible I find some people just don't know (or care about) the right way to use Slack. They need to be taught "Hey, don't bother 100 people in this channel for your niche question." Some are oblivious, some don't care about other people. Either way someone needs to pull them aside and say "stop it". Having management that allows that to continue indicates an unhealthy organization.

quesera 5y ago
Slack actually pops a dialog when you message @channel or @here. Message says, e.g.: Using @here pings everyone in the channel who's currently online. It's a bit noisy! Are you sure you want to send this? [Edit Message] [Send] Of course it doesn't always help!
- justin_oaks 5y ago
  Good point. I use @channel or @here so infrequently that I didn't remember that.

OrderlyTiamat 5y ago

How did they make the Confluence search be so horrible? I once searched a page title without noticing I was already at that page, and it couldn't find it. I literally copied the title in and it still didn't find it. truly an awesome (as in awe and fear inspiring) piece of software.

geodel 5y ago
It might be an effort to make Confluence truly enterprise grade.