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Anonymous
February 7, 2011
Question

RH8 and RoboServer 8 Search Issues - no ranking and renders list most relevant last

Hello

I have a RoboHelp 8 project and I am publishing it to RoboServer 8 in Flash Help Pro format.

The Indexing works great, but the Search process leaves a lot to be desired.  In the example below

I searched for the word video, because I know I have a lot of videos in the project.  Notice (image below) in the search pane

on the left that any topic that has the word video is located at the bottom of the list that was returned.

I noticed that when this list was rendered, it appeared that "Distribute Your Survey Video" did come in

first, but rendered at the bottom of the list.  Is there a way to get this to reverse and show the most relevant

at the top of the list?

Note, we were using Web Help previously and the Search in RH8 worked great along with the ranking, etc.

With our new release of our product on January 22, we changed the help to Flash Help Pro and had someone

design a new flash help skin that matched our product, so we need to use FlashHelp Pro and publish to

RoboServer 8.

I read up on this and found that there are two modes of search, one that defaults to the server search/indexing and one

that defaults to the client search.  I modified the installation file on the server to accept the client side, because I thought it

was the server that was causing the problem, but this did not help.

Anyone, that has come across this problem and has a solution, I would be eternally grateful for your input.

Thanks, Lana

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5 replies

tuls_garg
tuls_garg
Inspiring
February 15, 2011

Hi Lana, CJ

RoboHelp Server does support ranking of search results both for WebHelpPro and FlashHelpPro and also for both modes of indexing i.e. Server Side Indexing and Client Side Indexing.

@CJ: The search results are sorted according to relevance by default and the only reason we do not show any ranking numbers in search results list in FlashHelp is because it's kind of obvious that the first results is #1 and second is #2 and so on . Even for WebHelp, starting with RoboHelp 9, authors have an option to hide the rank field in search result list because the ranks are kind of obvious and they unnecessarily take up a lot of space in search result pane.

Now the reason your topic "Distribute Your Survey Video" is listed down in the list, could be that it is actually less relevant than otehr topics in context of search query "video". Relevance of a topic for a search query is calculated on basis of number of things which include:

  • If searched word occurs in topic title
  • If searched word occurs in headings within topic
  • If searched word is a keyword in topic
  • Number of occurences of searched word in topic

It could be possible that other topics are ranked higher because they have more occurences of word "video" or some other combination of above mentioned reasons.

To increase ranking for your topic "Distribute Your Survey Video", you can make "video" as a search keyword in that topic using the "Topic Properties" page in RoboHTML.

Tulika

Adobe RoboHelp Team

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MeWrite
Known Participant
February 22, 2011

Tulika  - we have tried both types of search options in FlashHelp Pro.  It has never worked and does not rank.  There are also instances where topics that should display don't even come back as an option.  I have PDFs and topics that don't even have the search term in the document return as a valid result.  I have tested this several times last summer when we were trying to decide which layout to use.  It never came back with the expected results based on the search Ranking defined by RH.

We simply decided to use WebHelp Pro and never had any issues and received the expected results every time.

If there is something more to be done than setting the search option in FlashHelp Pro than in WebHelp Pro, I would love to know the steps as I still would prefer to use the FlashHelp Pro.  This thread also indicates that ranked results cannot be done in FlashHelp or FlashHelp Pro:  http://forums.adobe.com/message/2242337#2242337

Regards,

CJ

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Adobe Employee
Piyush_B
Adobe Employee
February 9, 2011

Hi Lana,

If you publish the same project as WebHelp Pro, then does the search works correctly?

Thanks and regards,

Piyush

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Anonymous
February 10, 2011

Hi Piyush and thanks for responding. 

Unfortunately, we have to use FlashHelp Pro in order to use the customized flash skin that was created to match the design colors of our new product. 

When I try to generate the SSL WebHelp Pro, the new customized flash skin is not a choice from the gallery.  I assume this is because the skin we are using was

created in Flash. 

If you or anyone has another suggestion on how we can improve the search process using Flash Help Pro, please let me know.  Thanks again for trying.

Regards,

Lana

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MeWrite
Known Participant
February 14, 2011

Lana -- Ranked searching in FlashHelp Pro does not work, this has nothing to do with the Flash Skin.  We found that to be an issue last year.  We actually switched over to WebHelp Pro layout just so that we could get ranked search results.

See this thread http://forums.adobe.com/thread/654935?tstart=0 for information about better search results.  Not much helped us get the results or the ranking we wanted in FlashHelp Pro and in the end we decided to ditch FlashHelp Pro.

We wrote up a bug for this, but near as I can tell it was not fixed for RH8 or RH7.

Regards,

CJ

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