4 ms·

I'd take confluence over google docs because of how bad Google Docs' search is surprisingly

by Macha 4y ago

l2silver 4y ago
Do you mean searching within a document, or searching with google drive? I've found that google drive search is incredible, they've done a great job of indexing everything.
- Macha 4y ago
  They have no content excerpts in search results, so it doesn't provide any help for finding which result is the one you want. It also weights titles incredibly heavy, which combined with the previous part led to me not even noticing it searched the document body for years.
matwood 4y ago
Interesting. Not that long ago we moved everything out of Confluence into Google Drive because GD search worked. Confluence search was horrible to find docs I knew were there.
- SgtBastard 4y ago
  Confluence’s search is so bad, it might as well be a Write Once, Read Never tool.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    That's because no-one bothers to read the documentation linked in the search field. Protip: Use wildcards extensively. Differently from Google, Confluence search considers keywords entered to be limited by word delimiters. so foo matches only foo, not barfoo or footer. Use them with some wildcards, foo, and the search results starts to make sense.
triceratops 4y ago
Oh yeah it's not great either I agree. But the use case for Google Docs is somewhat different in my mind. It's good for collaboration and discussion, rather than a source of truth to describe "how things are right now". It's annoying if you can't find a particular document immediately but it's not the end of the world. Discussion on a Google Doc will happen for a few weeks or a quarter, then die down and the doc will seldom be looked at again. You might link to it from tricky parts of your codebase but it's not essential to a high-level understanding. Confluence and other wiki systems are clearly meant for longer-lived documentation and canonical information. You should link from or attach your working documents (spreadsheets, slide decks etc) to your wiki documentation for people to discover why certain decisions were taken. But if the wiki's discoverability is poor or it's not well-maintained or regularly reviewed, it's basically useless.
radicality 4y ago
Not a fan of Google docs either, but I recently discovered CloudSearch which imo does a better job at searching Drive (and searches emails too, and few other places). link: https://cloudsearch.google.com https://cloudsearch.google.com

I'd take confluence over google docs because of how bad Google Docs' search is surprisingly

by Macha 4y ago

I'd take confluence over google docs because of how bad Google Docs' search is surprisingly

Do you mean searching within a document, or searching with google drive? I've found that google drive search is incredible, they've done a great job of indexing everything.

Macha 4y ago
They have no content excerpts in search results, so it doesn't provide any help for finding which result is the one you want. It also weights titles incredibly heavy, which combined with the previous part led to me not even noticing it searched the document body for years.

matwood 4y ago

Interesting. Not that long ago we moved everything out of Confluence into Google Drive because GD search worked. Confluence search was horrible to find docs I knew were there.

SgtBastard 4y ago
Confluence’s search is so bad, it might as well be a Write Once, Read Never tool.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  That's because no-one bothers to read the documentation linked in the search field. Protip: Use wildcards extensively. Differently from Google, Confluence search considers keywords entered to be limited by word delimiters. so foo matches only foo, not barfoo or footer. Use them with some wildcards, foo, and the search results starts to make sense.

triceratops 4y ago

Oh yeah it's not great either I agree. But the use case for Google Docs is somewhat different in my mind. It's good for collaboration and discussion, rather than a source of truth to describe "how things are right now". It's annoying if you can't find a particular document immediately but it's not the end of the world. Discussion on a Google Doc will happen for a few weeks or a quarter, then die down and the doc will seldom be looked at again. You might link to it from tricky parts of your codebase but it's not essential to a high-level understanding. Confluence and other wiki systems are clearly meant for longer-lived documentation and canonical information. You should link from or attach your working documents (spreadsheets, slide decks etc) to your wiki documentation for people to discover why certain decisions were taken. But if the wiki's discoverability is poor or it's not well-maintained or regularly reviewed, it's basically useless.

radicality 4y ago

Not a fan of Google docs either, but I recently discovered CloudSearch which imo does a better job at searching Drive (and searches emails too, and few other places). link: https://cloudsearch.google.com https://cloudsearch.google.com