12 Replies Latest reply on Jul 5, 2016 9:19 AM by udit.shah

    The future of Jive search?

    ReeceO
    ReeceO Apr 25, 2016 2:45 AM

      We’ve recently competed a user survey about our Jive intranet. One thing we found disappointing was people’s feelings about search.

       

      Before we moved to Jive, our intranet was built on 15 year old software; not surprisingly, search was a major problem. Only 54% found it very or quite helpful. So a better search was important to us. Two years into Jive, we repeated the survey. 66% found Jive search very or quite helpful. An improvement – but not the step change we were hoping for. We were told that improvements were coming; and we communicated some of the tips to improve the search experience.

       

      We have just repeated the survey, four years into Jive; 68% find it helpful. It is disappointing; particularly given the improvements made to search engine technology over the past ten years. We have previous experience of an enterprise search engine called Autonomy, so we know how good intranet search can be. Finding the right material quickly is a fundamental priority for an intranet; as my boss said “If you ask me for my three priorities for the intranet, they are Search, Search, Search.”

       

      We’re about to move to Cloud, and understand that there are some search engine tweaks in that, but what plans are there to introduce a step change in Jive’s search, to take advantage of the improvements now available in intranet search engines?

        • Re: The future of Jive search?
          jeph.yang Apr 25, 2016 8:40 AM (in response to ReeceO)

          Hi Ollie,

           

          Thanks for raising your concerns over existing Jive search and the future roadmap. I'll be happy to check in with our Search Team and share any details I'm able to gather. Did you have specific features or improvements in mind?

           

          Regards,

          Jeph Yang

            • Re: The future of Jive search?
              ReeceO
              ReeceO Apr 26, 2016 9:14 AM (in response to jeph.yang)

              Some of our users think we should have a search engine as good as Google. Now, I know that the algorithm that makes Google great is not effective on an intranet (we can also talk about the difference between ‘first pattern search’ v ‘known item search’).

               

              But there seem to have been great developments both in semantic relevancy (e.g. Verity) and statistical relevancy (e.g. Autonomy). Maybe Jive could explore these routes?

                • Re: The future of Jive search?
                  jeph.yang Apr 26, 2016 10:13 AM (in response to ReeceO)

                  Hi Ollie,

                   

                  Thanks for the clarification. I've reached out to my team for guidance on our roadmap and any Cloud or future improvements I could share with you, and I'll share what I find with you..

                   

                  Regards,

                  Jeph Yang

                  • Re: The future of Jive search?
                    jfromont
                    jfromont Champion Jun 20, 2016 9:03 PM (in response to ReeceO)

                    Hello, this is an interesting discussion. Have you implemented any enterprise search engine?

                      • Re: The future of Jive search?
                        ReeceO
                        ReeceO Jun 21, 2016 8:57 AM (in response to jfromont)

                        Hi Joel,

                         

                        Thanks for commenting. We do not have any additional enterprise search engine. We do not need to search multiple portals, only our one Jive instance, therefore prefer to use the search within Jive. I would still be interested to hear if you have any experience with these though.

                         

                        Looking at Jeph's account is appears deactivated so he's possibly left the company. I will try to pull Jive back in on this thread.

                         

                        Thanks,

                        Ollie

                          • Re: The future of Jive search?
                            udit.shah Jun 22, 2016 7:42 AM (in response to ReeceO)

                            Hi Oliver,

                             

                            Thank you for the reach out. This is an area we are looking into actively and you should see improvements in search patterns in the upcoming releases. Are there specific items from a search perspective that you would want Jive to look at , or has the feedback been around Search accuracy?Also, do you have any bridged communities with Jive, that you use Jive search for?

                             

                            Thanks,

                            Udit

                              • Re: The future of Jive search?
                                ReeceO
                                ReeceO Jun 27, 2016 12:49 AM (in response to udit.shah)

                                Hi Udit,

                                 

                                We are not searching any additional bridged communities or external SharePoint. We just have our one Jive instance. I have some specific topics from our team...

                                 

                                Latest search techonology?

                                My boss asks... "Making sure they are making the most of developments in search technology over the last ten years." What is the current technology, is it still Lucene and where does this currently stand against other search technologies?

                                 

                                Multi-word synonyms

                                We are excited we will get 'content synonyms' back with our move to Jive cloud. However, if we were able to add multi-word synonyms this seems like something that could greatly affect search. (See Allow multi-word synonyms when defining Search Synonyms).

                                 

                                More than a synonym pair?

                                Synonyms can currently only be added as a pair, so extending the amount of words/phrases that can be related would also help.

                                We also think Jive search is not so good with 'misspellings'. We have added our own words into the spell check for company specific products, but a lot of times people search differently or wrongly and they don't get valid search results, while Google seems to be able to suggest the correct ones if things are misspelt. Maybe this is where adding multiple and multi-word synonyms could be helpful.

                                Improve social search

                                We know search rankings are tailored for individuals based on dynamic signals derived from activity within Jive, but we still struggle with some results. Here is an example... my colleague is always referring to one of our documents: Greenhouse: Identifying disabled users in Active Directory. But whenever they type... account control user in search, it doesn't pick it up. The reason they type those words is because they know it's similar to what the attribute is called in the doc, but the issue is that in the document, it is useraccountcontrol and they typed them all separately. The document isn't tagged with the words either and that's why it isn't picking it up. But I would assume it would pick it up because...  1) they keep looking at this document,  2) the words are all in the document. I think this is what people struggle with. They type words they remember are associated with a document but when they search they don't find it purely because they are use the wrong search terms (like me!) and the document is not tagged. I think sometimes, the system doesn't seem to display results the way we think.

                                 

                                A comprehensive guide to search

                                The Jive documentation https://docs.jivesoftware.com/ provides a few tips on how a user can search, but I feel there is little documentation on how search works.

                                These two docs are a good start but haven't been updated in since 19-Mar-2014...

                                Search in 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x and Cloud

                                How does search work?

                                 

                                It would be good to have a comprehensive article on how tags affect search. Not everyone tags their content, and the people that do don't always tag correctly or in a consistent way. Do single tags or multi word tags work best? What about incorrect tagging or overly tagged items, can this muddy results? How does this all affect the content in search?  Some users often enter multi-word tags that are long, specific or more like a twitter hashtag. Would they be better with more simple one-word common tags? (doc above still refers to old underscore method)

                                 

                                Analyzing user search behavior

                                We are lucky enough to be able to pull out a report of search terms and frequency, but it is difficult to go beyond the numbers. A better way for us to look into search behavior would be to see what someone searched for, and then what document they went onto view. Is that possible?

                                 

                                Display of search results

                                Impressed with the cleaner look in Jive cloud. One thing that continues to feel messy is the way Jive search highlights key words and phrases from body text and displays this. Sometimes this feels like a very random mix of text snippets. Especially with uploaded documents (ppt, doc, xls, pdf). If the content creator added a document description on uploaded file, it might be nicer to see this.