Searching the Documentation

[Jordan Mantha]

Matthew East wrote:
> Hi Phil,
>
> * Phil Bull:
>   
>> I thought I'd provide an overview of the current state of searching our
>> docs, and suggest some possible improvements for discussion.
>>     
>
> Thanks for this careful and helpful review.
>
> {snip}
>
>   
>> SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS
>>
>> Ideally, we would unify the way we search the documentation, rather than
>> making users visit a load of different websites and making a load of
>> different searches. This would probably be difficult to do in the case
>> of the (offline) system documentation, but should be easy enough with
>> the others.
>>
>> Google offer a service called Custom Search Engine [4] which would be
>> able to search all of our documentation at once. We could also integrate
>> it into the documentation websites and give it Ubuntu branding. There is
>> also the possibility of weighting and categorising search results.
>>
>> Results could be weighted on the basis of which source they come from
>> (e.g. 4 for official docs, 3 for community docs, 2 for the forums and 1
>> for external docs), although I don't know if this approach would serve
>> users the best.
>>
>> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
>>     
>
> That's basically a pretty good idea, I think. I'm slightly wary of a
> tool that searches resources outside the actual site that the user is
> searching from, because I think that it will increase the confusion that
> we already see about users not knowing which part of the Ubuntu
> ecosystem they are in. I think there are lots of small improvements we
> can make to the individual areas - for example, the wiki search could be
> improved so that (a) the Title search is removed by default; (b) the
> search results formatting is improved, etc. I don't think that would be
> a lot of work for the right person. For the system docs, we can improve
> the search results by introducing keywords to the various sections of
> our documentation (in the actual code, they don't appear to the reader).
>
> However, outside of those improvements, there are clear advantages to
> having a unified search system which you have set out really well and I
> think it is definitely worth trying to work through the various issues.
> I know that the two Matts, newz2000 and mpt are interested in developing
> search.ubuntu.com, so they might help draw up a battleplan, as it were.
>
>   
I'd like to just throw in real quick that Brandon Holtsclaw (imbrandon)
has written a custom Google search engine for Ubuntu at
http://www.ubuntuwire.com/ . From a brief discussion with him it sounded
like once it was set up it is easy to add/remove URLs to search and can
give weighted results. I personally think maybe it would be cool to have
something like an engine that searches:
  1. www.ubuntu.com
  2. help.ubuntu.com (static docs)
  3. help.ubuntu.com/community
and weights them in that order and adds a little "Search results from
Ubuntu website", "Search results from official  documentation" (yeah, I
know Matt's not going to like "official", and "Search results from
community documentation".

The more I work on various projects the more I like the idea of having
more of a knowledge base that people search rather than a documentation
system that you navigate.  I think having a prominent search bar and
then underneath it links to like the top 10 requested topics would be
really cool. I think this approach could work fairly well for system
documentation, as I think our topic based help has shown. It just seems
like the tools aren't quite there yet though. I wonder how hard it would
be to essentially make the system documentation be a large HTML (perhaps
a HTML export of a wiki)  database with like a Google search frontend.
As projects come along they can just add in their topics. Come to think
of it. There is so much research going into web search engines it's kind
of a shame we don't harness that more for documentation. Things like
showing similar topics or related topics, recent searches, favorite
searches.

Sorry for the braindump, I'm frantically trying to prepare a LUG
presentation.

-Jordan

-Jordan