[HN Gopher] Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
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Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?
The title says it all. To me, the most important component of a
wiki is search. With that said, why is confluence wiki search
basically unusable? (by unusable, I mean I can never find the page
I am looking for when I search. Basically, I have to maintain my
own wiki of important links I may need to reference in the future)
Author : nicktorba
Score : 128 points
Date : 2021-09-20 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Try gmail. More than a decade on and _still_ no partial word
| match.
| lelandfe wrote:
| And from a search company, no less.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I usually have better luck with the "autocomplete" results in
| gmail search than with the actual search results. I don't even
| know how you manage to screw up your core competency that
| badly.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Gmail produces by far the best search results for me (comparing
| to apple mail and thunderbird) and makes me reach for it
| regularly for search alone, which I find pretty annoying. If
| there is anything better out there I am all ears.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > If there is anything better out there I am all ears.
|
| Mutt, Pine, grep, awk, etc. I don't understand why throwing a
| GUI interface on top automatically seems to make email search
| absolutely awful, this includes Gmail. I so often need to
| find a specific old email using a hazy match criteria that I
| am half tempted to pipe my email into Splunk (I run a small
| Splunk cluster at home for other needs) and use it (as then I
| don't need a local copy of every email on all devices or to
| need to SSH into a central box to do a TUI based search)
| modeless wrote:
| Because "enterprise" tools are bought by people who don't have to
| use them, so improvements that actually matter to users are not a
| priority.
| itomato wrote:
| Lucene
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't understand why people use confluence.
|
| I can gain far more functionality with a properly implemented
| self-hosted mediawiki server (the same code that runs wikipedia
| itself) with a number of useful plugins installed and enabled.
|
| It doesn't require a rocket science level of apache2+php7+mariadb
| knowledge to set up. The instructions are really quite
| straightforward.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| In corporate environment paying for Confluence Cloud
| subscription can be cheaper than having even a part time admin
| to install and maintain self-hosted solution (proper security,
| backups, handling compatibility issues on updates etc etc). It
| may not be the best solution, but it is good enough.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| In corporate environment how do you not already have an admin
| who can handle this just like they handle any of your other
| self-hosted needs? I've never worked for a single company
| that didn't have _something_ hosted internally.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| We started with a self-hosted mediawiki server and this did not
| go well. Expecting someone not very computer savvy (and there
| are lots of those in my company) to dive into the markup on a
| page and not make a mess of it was a bad idea. At that time at
| least the WSIWYG editor was not very usable. Don't know if that
| is still the case.
|
| So off we went to Atlassian. It has many flaws, but nobody is
| pining for the old days of Mediawiki. And the hooks Confluence
| has in to Jira is something you don't get with plain Mediawiki,
| and that has real use for us.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| You can literally go see for yourself how the WYSIWYG editor
| works these days. I suspect it's come a long way since the
| last time you checked it.
|
| My bigger question though is why the average user is
| important. Most large companies have employees whose entire
| job is ... knowledge management. If they can't figure out how
| to write wikitext then maybe they're not a good fit for the
| role?
| rablackburn wrote:
| If this is a serious question, this is why:
|
| Confluence users are enterprise companies, and getting a self-
| hosted server up and running is too much pain to be bothered to
| deal with.
|
| This is a process problem. The steps to get one would be
| something like:
|
| - try and find the "provision a server" option in the corporate
| service portal (there probably isn't one)
|
| - ask someone if they know how to provision one. Get a link to
| a separate system where you can make the request
|
| - you need to associate the instance with a cost centre, or
| maybe you literally need a credit card number, don't forget to
| attach written manager approval
|
| - update the project's budget to include the unexpected cost of
| this internal service. Hopefully there's actually some margin
| to afford it.
|
| - wait a day or two for the request to go through
|
| - get the instance details, RDP in and try and set everything
| up. Realise you need to make a separate request for admin
| rights to install non-base software if you don't want to use
| IIS and MSSQL server
|
| - wait a day for admin rights. Don't forget to add written
| manager approval to the request or else it will be denied
|
| - realise you need to make a separate DNS request to get a
| friendly url for the team to access it. Also, how are you going
| to secure access to just your team members? Need to integrate
| with the corporate AD
|
| - ...about a dozen more steps
|
| Compare all of that with:
|
| - Go to the corporate confluence instance
|
| - click "Create", add your team members with edit rights.
|
| - done
|
| Confluence itself may not be a great experience to use, but
| it's solving the problem of getting to the point of having a
| wiki setup in the first place.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > getting a self-hosted server up and running is too much
| pain
|
| And yet many of them self-host Confluence. And many other
| things. And provision servers all the time. And you have to
| provide a CC (or maybe PO) for Confluence in any case. And
| you _can 't_ just associate Confluence with a cost centre.
| And you have to budget it. And... literally every single one
| of your arguments applies just as much to Confuence.
| GordonS wrote:
| And firewall rules!
| GordonS wrote:
| Oh, and updating the CMDB too!
| sharva wrote:
| Yes both Jira and Confluence search are frustrating at times.
| This is one of the big wins of using Glean (https://glean.com)
| for me as a developer :-)
| abeppu wrote:
| I'll take a stab at actually guessing why aside from the issue
| that people making purchasing decisions don't see how bad it is
| until work has already gone into bringing in docs and pushing
| people to use it.
|
| Aside from the organizational issues, I think there's a problem
| where basically no search system can be good for every org with
| any kind of internal info and different queries from perhaps
| several distinct types of users with different goals. To get
| good, a system needs to improve through at least rudimentary ML.
| At its simplest, if Alice searches for X today and clicks doc3,
| if Bob searches for X tomorrow, doc3 should rank higher. This
| requires collecting and aggregating click stream data, and using
| this count info (with cardinality #docs x #queries) at search
| time. But sometimes it requires a richer model relating search
| terms to terms in relevant (clicked) docs and optimizing for some
| measure of search quality (NDCG) etc. All of this requires
| detailed access to docs, search/click histories, and a fair
| amount of computation and storage. But customers have legit
| reasons for wanting these docs to only be accessible by their own
| employees. And they don't want to dedicate their own staff to
| improving such a system. No one wants to hear that their model
| retaining ran out of memory, etc. So shipping a simple system
| which doesn't improve but doesn't have moving parts becomes a
| local optima.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I'm my experience almost everything that Atlassian makes is total
| garbage. Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, etc. are all horribly slow
| to the point of being unusable and most of it has very poor
| UI/UX. I pretty much don't recommend anything they make. It's not
| surprising at all that a fundamental feature of a wiki, _search_
| , doesn't work very well.
| noja wrote:
| That's what everyone has said about every piece of enterprise
| software ever.
| walrus01 wrote:
| wait until you see _medical_ enterprise software or defense
| industry enterprise software
| acdha wrote:
| It happens any time the buyer isn't the user. Atlassian
| products are terrible because some manager buys them and
| tells everyone they have to use it, and if the engineers
| complain they'll probably just blow it off as "they're too
| demanding" or "they don't want to do Agile right".
| kube-system wrote:
| It's the incentives that are in place. Most enterprises buy
| products based on feature sets. Therefore, enterprise
| software companies prioritize delivering features.
| m463 wrote:
| I remember what a friend said about software.
|
| The desktop people want the latest and greatest software ASAP
| if not sooner.
|
| The server people want nothing to change, ever.
|
| I'm sure enterprise software has similar rules and
| incentives.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Atlassian products feel like raw database frontends. I feel
| like each screen in each Atlassian product is always exactly a
| database table, being presented to me as an auto-generated
| form. Might as well use SQL directly.
| mdoms wrote:
| That really couldn't be further from the truth, especially in
| Jira. Jira keeps virtually every piece of interesting
| information in a custom field, including built-in fields like
| issue titles and points (known as system fields but
| effectively the same thing). Every view you see is the
| product of a zillion complicated joins across field
| definitions, field schemes, field values, field permissions
| and other bits and pieces.
| [deleted]
| sophacles wrote:
| Why use a single query languange when one for each view is
| possible?
|
| - Atlassian probably
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| The truly impressive feat (of Jira in particular, but also
| all of Atlassian's products in general) is how incredibly
| slow they are. I assume each page somehow touches every
| single row of every single table in the database because I
| don't know what else it could be doing to make page loads
| take so long.
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's artificially slow to get you to upgrade. Wish I was
| joking. Thankfully my company uses Clubhouse/Shortcut which
| is orders of magnitude better.
| hotpxl wrote:
| So true. The way Atlassian hijacks browser keyboard hotkeys in
| Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket is purely infuriating.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have seen self-hosted Jira installs that took 20+ sec to load
| a page.
|
| Today I use one that they host and there is nothing wrong with
| it.
| nicoburns wrote:
| We used the hosted version. It would lag on the order of
| seconds while trying to type in the issue description box. We
| switched to another issue management software.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I tried their hosted version for a bit on their 30-day trial
| or whatever.
|
| Virtually every page load took upwards of 5 seconds.
| CodeAndCuffs wrote:
| IMO bitbucket is okay. Its UX for PRs is amazing, 1000x better
| than Githubs. Especially its side by side diff.
|
| This concludes, and fully encompasses, everything good that I
| have to say about Atlassian products.
| cosmotic wrote:
| We use bitbucket cloud, and the PR UX is awful. Which version
| are you using? Are you using a browser extension or
| something? Compared to UpSource or GitHub, Bitbucket PRs are
| very rough.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Bitbucket Cloud and Bitbucket On-prem are two entirely
| separate products. It makes about as much sense as you can
| expect from Atlassian. The former was a Mercurial thing
| that they purchased then later removed Mercurial support.
| The latter used to be called Stash.
|
| We moved from Bitbucket On-prem to Gitlab and I must admit
| I do miss parts of Bitbucket's UI. It was much easier to
| find reviews you needed to do and it was much clearer when
| reviewers had finished reviewing and if work needed to be
| done. Gitlab should just copy this stuff.
| jschumacher wrote:
| I was the head of product for the developer tools at
| Atlassian in 2012. We thought long and hard about taking
| Bitbucket cloud and packaging it in a VM (which is what
| GitHub did at the time) or leveraging the platforms we've
| already built for Confluence and Jira that would give us
| access control and a plug-in system from day 1. It was a
| tough call.
|
| Ultimately we've decided to build on top of our server
| platforms and target companies with 1000+ employees from
| day one. That decision had a huge impact on how we
| approached performance and what features we prioritised.
| The hierarchy of projects and permissions associated with
| them as well as the way we designed Pull Requests are
| good examples of that.
|
| It was the right decision at the time, even if the
| product happened to be different in cloud and server,
| which did lead to some confusion. But Stash customers
| were really happy with the product.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Try to use Intellij's Github plugin. It does wonders.
| rdw wrote:
| Atlassian bought Bitbucket after it was already mature.
| That's why!
| jschumacher wrote:
| Not quite. Bitbucket was acquired in 2011, only supported
| Mercurial and was missing a lot of features, including the
| pull request available today.
| jschumacher wrote:
| Bitbucket Server, which some people are referring to here,
| was build from the ground up, tailored to a self hosting
| environment.
| omgtehlion wrote:
| Well, they bought Trello and ruined it too :(
| FreezerburnV wrote:
| What's wrong with Trello? It still seems to run fast? And has
| some new stuff added that seems to be useful? Dunno, still
| seems to be fine to me.
| marcodiego wrote:
| They are garbage for developers but managers love it. Guess who
| decides in the end?
| kvathupo wrote:
| +1, Bitbucket search often returns results from older versions
| of a repo. Wouldn't be an issue if syncing to the current
| master didn't take a few days...
| abridgett wrote:
| It didn't really seem to have any prioritisation - e.g. around
| titles, headings or any metadata (view count, edits, last
| updates). Agree completely it was awful.
|
| OTOH I'm also a believer that you should be able to navigate to
| the right information.
|
| People seem to think that writing pages is sufficient. A library
| works because pages are gathered in books, organised by sections
| and has an army of librarians to keep it running smoothly.
|
| I treat documentation like code - DRY, refactor apply just the
| same. e.g. I might split a page up so that some common part can
| be re-used. I'll cull obsolete information or mark it obsolete.
| I'll _also_ updated headings to help them show up in searches.
| Kalanos wrote:
| Confluence search is great! I could always find what I needed. In
| fact it's my favorite feature about Confluence. I'd say it's my
| favorite search outside of Google.
| mdoms wrote:
| I used to work at Atlassian but NOT on Confluence and I have no
| special information about this. But I can tell you that
| internally it is well known how awful the search is - they run
| one of the biggest known instances of Confluence - and there have
| been many spikes and projects to improve it. I have spoken to
| lots of people and asked why it continues to be so bad but all I
| get is handy-waving about how it's such a hard problem.
|
| Honestly I wish I knew more but it was like pulling teeth trying
| to get people there to speak openly about why it's so hard when
| it is solved in so many other products.
| hyperation wrote:
| Same experience for me. However, I started to be more diligent on
| tagging each Confluence page whenever I see them lacking and that
| definitely helps with the searches.
| leetrout wrote:
| So I am interested in this space. There are some alternatives out
| there but I suspect companies will be concerned with letting a
| 3rd party have access to the data needed. If you are interested
| in this space and would be willing to chat with me about what
| you're looking for OR what you are currently using I'd love to
| chat! My email is my username at gmail.com
|
| Some existing tooling:
|
| Google cloud search has a confluence connector
| https://developers.google.com/cloud-search/docs/connector-di...
|
| Elastic workplace search has a connector.
| https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/workplace-search/current/wor...
|
| Lessonly had / had a thing called Obie
| https://www.lessonly.com/blog/how-to-search-better-in-conflu...
|
| Raytion https://www.raytion.com/connectors/raytion-confluence-
| connec...
| svcrunch wrote:
| Hi there. One of the first customers we had (zir-ai.com) asked
| for help building a better JIRA search.
|
| I think neural-network powered search will be the long-term
| solution for Wiki search specifically, and SaaS search more
| generally.
|
| Keyword has too many failure cases, and works poorly when
| there's not a lot of data, or when searching through content
| authored by others.
|
| I'll contact you offline. Would love to hear more about your
| experience in this area.
| CPLX wrote:
| This thread is well timed, I was just about to pick a wiki
| solution and was leaning towards confluence. But search is really
| important to me.
|
| What's the prevailing wisdom these days on the best solution for
| an internal knowledge base/wiki platform?
| sethammons wrote:
| As for an ok way to manage internal knowledge, I've yet to see
| it. I've wanted to try out the Johnny Decimal System because if
| you can create a solid hierarchy of a filing system, everyone
| should be able to drill down to the right doc. Confluence
| search doesn't work. Neither does google docs. I think I now
| want the ability to just pull a local copy of a section of
| docs, say "all engineering," and just use grep locally.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Markdown + Grep
| polote wrote:
| I'm working on one, V1 is going to be released in a few days
| (you can find the link in my profile). It is meant to be a big
| improvement to Confluence if your goal is to organize the
| knowledge at company or department level. If you are a smaller
| team, Notion is what I would recommend as long as you are
| smaller than 100 people
| boyter wrote:
| I found the search pretty iffy at times. There was an exisiting
| marketplace app for it that was not much better so I wrote my
| own. Then turned it into a full marketplace app so others could
| benefit.
|
| It does partial matches anywhere in a word, supports every
| language even in the same document, and even has regex support
| for those who need it. Update instantly with instant filters.
|
| It can find things like 168.0 in 192.168.0.1 which the existing
| confluence search cannot for example. Or search for AKIA
| credentials /AKIA[A-Z0-9]{16}/ I have heard people describe it as
| Agolia for confluence which makes me happy.
|
| https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1225034/better-instan...
| phone8675309 wrote:
| ysk: You can save sites for reference later if you don't want to
| create a page in Confluence to do it:
| https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/save-a-p...
|
| If you want best of both words, you can use the "Favorite Pages
| Macro" on any page to reference all of the pages that you have
| saved for later, which makes keeping that page up to date with
| your latest changes to saved pages trivial.
| polote wrote:
| Searching corporate wiki is pretty difficult, because contrary to
| something like Google, you can't use context of a search query to
| recommend content.
|
| * First you have a few occurrence of the same search query in
| your search history (because only a few people searched similar
| words in the past)
|
| * You can't either use synonyms of remove stop words to recommend
| better content (IT, can means "information technology, or the
| pronoun. THE can be an acronym, ...).
|
| So basically the only thing you can do is search words.
| Confluence is worse than that because it tries to remove stop
| words and do things that break exact match search. But this is a
| difficult job. Ways to improve search: allow multi titles, index
| with tags, attributes, only do exact words match, allow users to
| suggest content for a specific search query, search
| autocompletion, searching in live during typing ... (many things
| that Confluence doesn't care about). You also have to respect
| rights when returning documents, each documents, can have rights
| from folder or document itself, inherited from team access or
| user access, so this is really computation intensive too, or pre-
| compute rights
|
| (Working on a competitor [0] of Confluence and I have put plenty
| of hours of work on that specific issue, and I can tell you this
| is really hard)
|
| [0] https://dokkument.com
| klyrs wrote:
| Confluence _does_ search while typing, it 's just _so abysmally
| slow_ that you typically won 't get a result until you've
| stopped typing.
| oconnore wrote:
| It seems like there ought to be some recognition that these are
| business tools, and ought to be designed with power users in
| mind. Instead, "search" in B2B products is built with the same
| uber-minimalist UX as B2C search.
|
| Even early Google had more power user features than a typical
| B2B product search bar.
|
| Boolean expressions (NOT, OR, AND), exact match strings, links-
| to, linked-from, in-folder/category, etc. should be mandatory
| for these workflows. Better if you can include search queries
| as live page content, as in Notion & Height.
| polote wrote:
| Knowledge management is still a neglected area in most of
| companies. No money => a few players. Confluence has been
| there for years with almost no competition. Notion has
| emerged recently but is not really a good fit for medium to
| large companies. As a result Confluence is not worried and
| doesn't have to improve its product.
|
| Power users are a small share of users of knowledge
| management software, so it is difficult to build a system
| only for them. Most people just type a few words and give up
| if they don't find the result in the 5 first results.
| dragosbulugean wrote:
| We're also trying to build something in the space with
| www.archbee.io, a YC company.
| oconnore wrote:
| > Power users are a small share of users of knowledge
| management software, so it is difficult to build a system
| only for them
|
| In practice, knowledge management at companies is a
| specialization. There are <5% of employees that go around
| and document/organize things for everyone else. Most
| employees are passively consuming information and
| information hierarchies built by someone else.
|
| If you're not building tools for those power users, you're
| not building for creating and organizing content in your
| system at all.
|
| As an example of how nuts this is, managers at my company
| regularly try out various search terms, create index
| documents, and do "internal SEO" to optimize how other
| employees will discover documents. This isn't a byzantine
| environment like public web search is, why do I have to
| hack around the wiki's default notion of page relevance?
| polote wrote:
| Well it depends of what you are talking about. Usually
| people who produce contents are power users. But people
| who search content as you said are the 95% of others
| users, these are the ones who also needs a search
| relevant to them.
|
| My belief is that knowledge management can't exist
| without power users, which we call "admins", these are
| the ones responsible to make sure content is well
| organized for others and create content if necessary.
| Those people need specific tools to do their job well,
| which to me is more something that you can have in an
| admin interface while all the users use the basic
| interface.
|
| Those tools have two sets of users, admins (curators,
| creators, organizers) and regular users. We need a
| different interface for both. And that's exactly what we
| are working on.
|
| > This isn't a byzantine environment like public web
| search is, why do I have to hack around the wiki's
| default notion of page relevance?
|
| That's exactly why I suggested to have multi titles, when
| you get that and you facilitate the suggestion of new
| titles for a document, anyone when finding a document can
| suggest the query terms he used, and that can benefit
| others users
| dangoor wrote:
| I agree. This is why I've tried to make use of Confluence's other
| tools to make content findable and also improve search...
|
| 1. give pages labels. This lets you insert a label-based index,
| and also makes it possible to narrow search by label
|
| 2. use spaces. Separate the content into spaces based on who is
| likeliest to need that information. You can narrow search by
| space, and put a search box on the page in the space.
|
| 3. use the hierarchy. You have to put the pages somewhere in the
| hierarchy anyway, so try to make it reasonable.
|
| 4. Make useful index pages. Obviously, this doesn't scale, but if
| you can provide people with useful starting points, it will help
| them. For example, at Khan Academy we have a space for the whole
| org with a front page to get you to every team's front page. The
| engineering team has a front page with a small collection of
| useful & commonly-used links
|
| 5. if you have a page in your hierarchy with a lot of content
| underneath it, add a search box on that page that constrains the
| search to that set of pages.
|
| The biggest problem Confluence search has is that it's terrible
| with relevance, and using its tools to narrow down the search can
| improve the relevance of the results considerably.
| Krssst wrote:
| In my understanding, you have to prefix all your keywords with
| "+" for all of them to be necessary for a page to be included in
| your results. This makes the behavior slightly closer to Google.
| RegW wrote:
| I'm amazed to see this here.
|
| My colleagues and I have been grumbling for ages that our
| instance of Confluence must be really badly configured. If you
| put in a single word search term, there will be lots of results,
| but no guarantee that any pages containing that word in the title
| (or body), will appear above ones where it doesn't.
|
| The search problem was solved long ago by Apache Solr/Lucene.
| Although this may not be true for multiple languages.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I crossed a huge milestone last week. I actually found something
| I was looking for in confluence.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Most search engines are pretty bad because the developers of most
| search engines don't do any work to improve relevance.
|
| This methodology works
|
| https://ccc.inaoep.mx/~villasen/bib/AN%20OVERVIEW%20OF%20EVA...
|
| and I used it to tune up the relevance of a search engine for
| patents to the point where users could immediately perceive that
| it worked better than other products.
|
| After I worked on that I wound up talking to the developers
| and/or marketing people for many enterprise search engines and
| few of them, if any, did any kind of formal benchmarking of
| relevance.
|
| People at one firm told me that they used to go to TREC
| conferences because they thought it got them visibility but that
| they decided it didn't so they quit going.
|
| A message I got repeatedly was that these firms thought that the
| people who bought the search engines didn't care much about
| relevance, but they did care about there being 200 or more plug-
| ins to import data from various sources.
|
| In principle the tuning is unique to the text corpus. One reason
| for that is that there is a balancing act of having a search
| engine that prefers small documents (they have spiky vectors that
| look more like query vectors) or large documents (they have so
| many words they match everything.) Different corpuses have
| different distributions of document sizes, not to mention
| different distributions of words that appear.
|
| Few organizations are willing to do the work to tune up a search
| engine (you have to decide about the relevance of 10,000+
| document hits), but I've had the experience that you can beat the
| pants off the defaults even using a generic tuning. For instance
| that patent search engine was tuned up against the GOV2 corpus
| instead of a patent corpus. A small patent corpus showed us we
| were on the right track, however.
| thedogeye wrote:
| It's unbelievably bad. This is literally the only thing you need
| a wiki for. I can't believe this is the market leader. Notion is
| going to crush them.
| simonw wrote:
| The good news here is that the Confluence API is actually really
| good, and very easy to integrate with.
|
| I wrote a custom search engine that worked by running on cron,
| pulling in all of the content from Confluence and writing it into
| a SQLite table with SQLite full-text search enabled (using
| https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#...),
| then sticking a https://datasette.io/ interface in front of it.
| dangoor wrote:
| It seems to me that the big problem with Confluence search
| (once you have a lot of pages) is that the results have poor
| relevance ranking. Wouldn't tossing the content into SQLite
| have the same problem?
| bartread wrote:
| On one level that's great and I'm certainly glad you made it
| work.
|
| On another level, and bearing in mind that Confluence is a paid
| product, this absolutely should not be necessary and competent
| search is something that Atlassian should provide out of the
| box.
|
| (Yes, I have beef with Confluence, but in my case it's
| primarily due to the historically awful editing experience.)
| CodeAndCuffs wrote:
| The API for writing docs/content to confluence is the worst
| i've ever seen. You are expected to use their custom syntax
| which then gets converted again before rendering.
|
| The docs for the POST content literally says to write what you
| want in confluences WYSIWYG, then do a GET API call to see what
| it should look like.
| irvingprime wrote:
| Compared to jira search Confluence search is quite good.
| sideproject wrote:
| I use BitBucket, because it's free and I've been using it for a
| long time. Maybe GitHub is faster, but I don't access BitBucket
| enough to justify migrating ~50 repos I have. Can't be bothered.
| Its UI/UX? meh. I got used to it.
|
| I use Confluence and Jira because, again, we use them at work. So
| I guess I'm using them because I have to. I also understand it's
| a pain to move our company from one to another (oh we've had
| discussions to move to Coda and others) but again, I'm not taking
| on that project. Again, UI/UX, search - all meh - they are
| working and I got used to it.
|
| The inconvenience of using them does not justify the amount of
| time I need to spend to overcome my inconvenience. Some things,
| you just have to let them slide.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I don't think it's unusually bad. Rather, if an app offers open
| ended search, it will generally generate fairly poor results.
| pornel wrote:
| No, it really is exceptionally bad even among half-assed search
| implementations.
|
| For a start, it interprets multiple words in a query as an OR.
| You search for a "hello world", you get "hello nobody" and
| "goodbye world" and the search results.
|
| It also always applies stemming, which mangles technical terms.
| At Cloudflare we have a daemon called "cloudflared" and it's
| impossible to find it in the damn wiki.
|
| If it even tries to do any prioritization, it's
| indistinguishable from random. I search for a project's name, I
| get fragment of meeting notes from 7 years ago, not the
| project's homepage.
|
| And the UI is unusably awful too. The fancy-ajaxy JS overlay
| breaks the Back button, so if you click on an irrelevant result
| (and all of them are irrelevant), pressing back doesn't go back
| to search results, but instead makes you lose document you were
| on.
| boyter wrote:
| If possible please try this
| https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1225034/better-
| instan... and let me know how it goes for you. No stemming
| applied, no term expansion etc... The back button issue
| exists (not sure if possible to fix that as a plugin), but id
| suggest opening results in a new tab to solve that issue.
| Cryptonic wrote:
| Yes it only finds you crap results. Not sure why they have the
| most naive search algorithm out there. Maybe good search needs
| more AI and CPU power than we think.
|
| Maybe this is something google should take on. A search plugin
| for Confluence where google crawlers logs in from time to time
| for internal crawling to enable non-public teach request on that
| data. That boost knowledge workers efficiency a lot. I hope
| somebody from Google reads this and takes on the challenge. I'm
| sure companies would pay a lot for this.
| leetrout wrote:
| This is a thing that exists already for Google Cloud Search
|
| https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/
|
| https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1212945/google-cloud-...
| deevin9 wrote:
| My company uses Coveo [www.coveo.com] for their intranet. They
| have a native connector for Confluence, it works MUCH better:
| https://docs.coveo.com/en/1716/index-content/install-the-cov...
| staplung wrote:
| It's been a long time since I worked at Google but when I did (10
| yrs ago), the search system for the intranet was notoriously
| awful. Part of the reason was that PageRank tends not to work so
| well in places where things aren't heavily cross-linked, which is
| a hard place to get to if you search system already sucks.
| modeless wrote:
| I always found those complaints funny. Google's internal search
| was and is light years ahead of every other company's. Those
| complaints were probably coming from people who never worked at
| any other large company and were expecting internal search to
| be as good as web search despite the relatively tiny corpus.
| dmpanch wrote:
| We are using Confluence for public and internal wiki, it has a
| bad search and really slow, but no matter how much everyone hates
| it, the market does not provide worthy alternatives.
|
| When choosing 3 years ago, we used the following criteria:
|
| * WYSIWYG editor. Any user must have a minimum effort to write
| documentation
|
| * Flexible access permissions to various parts of the
| documentation. Public documentation is open to anonymous users,
| the internal one is divided into many sections with access for
| certain groups
|
| * Multilingual support. Not out of the box, but possible with
| plugins
|
| * Multilingual pdf export. In some markets, some customers prefer
| to have exported manuals
|
| * The ability to inherit articles. We need to be able to make
| edits once, instead of duplicating the same articles
|
| * Have a relatively modern appearance. Wiki engines are familiar
| to many because the whole world uses Wikipedia, but this does not
| make them more pleasing to the eyes, if I can say so
|
| 3 years have passed, I periodically look at alternatives, so far
| only wiki.js seems like a good solution but it's not even close
| yet.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > the market does not provide worthy alternatives.
|
| MediaWiki?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Let's stop asking "why closed feature in closed product works so
| bad?" type of questions. The only appropriate answer is: because
| costumers continue to use it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > costumers continue to use it
|
| The people who make the decision to buy Confluence aren't the
| ones who have to use it.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| On a confluence that covers the whole of the Fortune 500 company
| I work for, I do NOT want to search over the corpus of _all_ the
| documents hosted on it. I want a persistent search filter where I
| can easily restrict my results within certain parameters without
| having to constantly re-filter my results.
|
| I think most search engine designers want to make the index as
| broad as possible, but the problem seems to be that people
| _rarely_ want such broad searches. What they really want are very
| detailed indices and metadata implications over well trodden
| folders.
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