SID-02321: Twiki search results ranking - users demanding a replacement

Status:	Asked	TWiki version:	6.0.0	Perl version:
Category:	CategorySearch	Server OS:		Last update:	4 years ago

I have been using Twiki in our organisation for years, and whilst I found it a little frustrating at first, I was determined to find a way to work with it and have now become a significant advocate and the resident power user (though I'm not a programmer, so depend on others for any perl understanding).

HOWEVER: My largely techincal user base are demanding a replacement wiki due to the immense pain they experience getting meaningful search results. The lack of a ranking or relevance rating on search results is the main problem - people are now so familiar with the excellence of Google search results that they have come to expect similar in all situtations. Which is frankly fair enough.

Now our Twiki is full of our client data so it is not exposed to the internet, thus the inability to spider to a search engine. One of my team has made the following observation and i'm hoping someone in the community might have some idea on how we could do this - I'm sure we can't be the first to wrestle with this.

_"The problem with the search is that it returns a list of all pages containing the search key word in alphabetical order. This is terribly primitive. What it should do is search for the key word in the Page Title -> H1 -> H2 -> H3 -> body text and prioritise return results in that order. For example, search for Splunk and you are probably looking for SplunkSupportProcessClientABC but that's about the 40th search hit."_

Please help me improve things so I can convince my team to stick with Twiki!

-- Jane Gianoutsos - 2017-06-26

Discussion and Answer

I guess no one can help. Better start working out what I'm migrating to. At least my users will be happy at that news.

-- Jane Gianoutsos - 2017-07-25

Have you tried third party search engines? Google gave me the folowing https://www.google.be/search?q=open+source+search+engine+internal .... https://github.com/jaeksoft/opensearchserver Install, configure, and include in TWiki?

-- TWiki Guest - 2017-08-07

Have you tried third party search engines? Google gave me the folowing https://www.google.be/search?q=open+source+search+engine+internal .... https://github.com/jaeksoft/opensearchserver Install, configure, and include in TWiki?

-- TWiki Guest - 2017-08-07

Cheers Guest. That's the final resort I was looking to. I'm just so used to Twiki having something native or plugin that I can use it's been a surprise that others haven't had similar complaints, and thus resolutions.

-- Jane Gianoutsos - 2017-09-08

Any news on this, did the third party search engine work?

-- TWiki Guest - 2021-06-14

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