Search User Manual for Topics

[sebastian_hemmannE3JAU]

[ FlexSim 20.2.0 ]

Hi, played around with FlexSim 2020 Update 2 Beta and searched for "Color Palette" in the (online) user manual.

It looks as if the search is also done in Google and returning web pages. I´m wondering why it is not showing any link to the searched page of the user manual?

Bug or feature?

If feature, what would be the right way to search for this topic to find it in the user manual?

[tanner_p]

@sebastian.hemmann,

What was the exact wording/phrasing of what you googled? When I searched the user manual for "Color Palette", the page you indicated was my first result.

[Ben_WilsonADSK]

Here is a .gif showing seemingly random and different results each time you press the search submit button:

FlexScript Class - Token, People Settings, FlexScript Class - Token (again), then finally Color Palette. I'm not really sure what to make of this.

We may need to implement our own search using Apache Solr or Elasticsearch or something. @jacob.gillespie

We're actually looking into integrating docs.flexsim.com search results into the automatic suggestions that Answers presents when you are composing a new question. AnswerHub uses Elasticsearch on their backend. Perhaps we'll be able to leverage that here on docs.flexsim.com as well. It's still in the exploratory stages. We'll see what happens.

[Ben_WilsonADSK]

Another interesting fact, searching "color palette site:docs.flexsim.com" directly at google.com DOES show the expected Color Palette page as the first result, and shows the same results each time I submit the query.

Not sure why the site search integrated into docs.flexsim.com would differ from a search directly from google.com. Something more to look into. @jacob.gillespie

[Ben_WilsonADSK]

@sebastian.hemmann,

Can you try searching a different version of the manual to see if you still get wacky results?

Some of us get the seemingly random results that I show below, while others get stable and sensible results like @tanner.p described.

I've found that my search results make more sense on the 20.1 version of the manual and older. If this is the case for you, perhaps because the content of the 20.2 manual is still new Google is serving different results to different people as it builds out its search graph (totally guessing).

You might also try on a different computer or from a different ISP. I've found that changing browsers or using private sessions makes no difference for my search results, so it seems more a result of my internet connection than anything.

Whatever the cause, it is on Google's side because the query that goes through to them is the same regardless of who submitted. So hopefully they'll get their act together on a proper index of the 20.2 version of the manual soon 🙂

[sebastian_hemmannE3JAU]

Hi @ben.wilson , tried out what you´ve described but this morning I get the following result:

Always the same result altough I use different browsers and look in different versions.

Also tried out other words. But it seems to work for me now. So what ever you´ve changed works for me.

Strangely the number of Google Ad results is changing and sometimes is even 0.

[sebastian_hemmannE3JAU]

Hi @tanner.p , "color palette" was the exact phrasing I´ve searched in the user manual.

[Ben_WilsonADSK]

Hi @sebastian.hemmann,

Looks like your attachments were lost. The images may show in your browser (cached) but for me they look like this:

Could you edit your comment and reattach your images?

BTW, I didn't change anything about the search. We still just send the same query to Google and let them do their thing, so if behavior is different now, that is just Google.

[sebastian_hemmannE3JAU]

@ben.wilson, sorry for the broken attachments. For me they still are shown. Sadly most times I´ve tried to visit this site and other services of FlexSim yesterday, the server was down.

[sebastian_hemmannE3JAU]

@Ben Wilson and @tanner.p, sorry but I have to bring this up again. In the last training session I tried to show how good our user manual works and we searched for "3d shape" because this returns the site: "Creating and Importing Custom 3D Objects" as best result in the offline user manual.

In the online user manual I don´t get close results, no mater what version I search in!?

And even if i search for "Creating and Importing Custom 3D Objects" the result is not found.

[Ben_WilsonADSK]

@sebastian.hemmann,

Not sure why they don't give more relevant results. It's somewhat surprising the in-docs search results are so bad, and certainly disappointing.

Google's search results of FlexSim docs starting from their own search page are really quite good:

https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+shape+site%3Adocs.flexsim.com

I'm not sure why the integrated search is so different.

In the end we may just need to do our own search indexing, instead of relying on Google. Some possibilities:

• https://www.meilisearch.com/
• https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
• https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/

[Ben_WilsonADSK]

@Markus Cueva,

This search shows expected results (search text: 3d shape site:docs.flexsim.com/en/19.0/😞

https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+shape+site%3Adocs.flexsim.com%2Fen%2F19.0%2F&oq=3d+shape+site%3Ad...

While this search is not as good (3d shape site:docs.flexsim.com/en/20.2/😞

https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+shape+site%3Adocs.flexsim.com%2Fen%2F20.2%2F&oq=3d+shape+site%3Ad...

This must be why a search of 3d shape site:docs.flexsim.com works great - it's pulling content from all versions. But then, when you narrow down to a single user manual version, results get wacky.

Is this because the content of user manuals, across versions, is 90% the same, and so Google's indexing is not taking into account identical pages from newer manuals? Thus when you search a newer manual, you don't get good results?

As our resident Google expert, do you know what, if anything, can be done to improve our Google Site Search performance to account for this apparent issue?

[markus_cuevaHPQHL]

@Ben Wilson Great question, and I'm not sure what the underlying issue might be. I've read that a lot of issues that can arise in Google Custom Searches, or in very specific searches across a branch of a website, are caching-related—maybe that's something we could try to automate by clearing the docs.flexsim.com cache every few weeks. Your theory about the content being 90% identical is interesting, because I could absolutely see Google trying to save time and bandwidth by indexing things differently in these cases. But if that's true, I'm not sure what the fix would be...

[Ben_WilsonADSK · Accepted solution]

@sebastian.hemmann,

We've implemented our own search on docs.flexsim.com:

Now each version of the user manual is individually indexed.

Hopefully this will give better results and a better user experience.