421149 - In-product help search result display

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[David Tenser [:djst]]

When coming from Firefox 3 to SUMO, searching the KB should visually separate Help topics over Support articles (as defined in http://wiki.mozilla.org/Support:PRD#Content_Types) in the following manner:

Help Topics matching your search
  - blah 
  - blah
  - blah

Support Articles that might also help
  - blah
  - blah
  - blah

Comment 1

[Nelson Ko [:nkoth]]

The least painful way of doing this, while we are still using Google's search, is to display a stub text at the bottom of each article saying "- This is a help article -" or "- This is a troubleshooting article -" and then use the Google features that allow searches to be filtered by "a required phrase" and/or "a forbidden phrase" on returned pages. We can then run concurrently queries from Google for help vs. support articles. Until we replace the search solution with something better for the long term, I think this is the best approach.

Please let me know if you want a different stub text than that suggested by me above.

The alternative approach of using a post-process method of filtering is too painful and unfeasible, as each search query from Google is limited to only 20 records.

Comment 2

[Nelson Ko [:nkoth]]

BTW, just to be clear, whether an article is a help or troubleshooting article is specified through an "additional category checkbox", and stored internally through the category feature, as previously discussed. The stub text is generated automatically by the system through the template (the main purpose of this stub text is to make visible our internal categorization of articles to Google, although it may be helpful to humans as well). 

Comment 3

[David Tenser [:djst]]

The proposed solution sounds good, especially since it would perform better than post-processing. Can this text be hidden using CSS and still searchable? In that case, the phrases could be shorter and more obscure, e.g. sumo_support_article and sumo_help_article.

Comment 4

[Nelson Ko [:nkoth]]

I wouldn't depend on hidden text being picked up. It's the kind of technique spam sites use and anti-spam countrmeasures might make these not be able to be picked up. This is code-ready on support-stage. I suggest a push to production and then refine later if necessary (file new bugs).