Customizable list of words to ignore to improve search results
I've been usability testing a test version of our UserVoice forums before they go live. Our users frequently use the product name as they are describing an issue (e.g., "Please do [some change] to [product]"). Because the idea filtering is based on an OR list of words, as soon as users type "[product]" 2 things happen:
The website speed crawls to a standstill, making it hard for them to continue typing and increasing their frustration.
A huge list of ideas appear that are no longer of any help whatsoever to them when looking for similar ideas.
I'd like to be able to set certain words (per forum) that can be ignored when filtering the ideas.
Autodesk Media & Entertainment Feedback Admin
shared this idea
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AdminJoey P
(Admin, UserVoice)
commented
Some words aren't searched unless quotes are used - "and", "add", "it", etc.
In some cases, these could be important words to a product and search results would be helpful to be returned.
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Peter Flynn
commented
Btw, it looks like this "add your own custom ignored words" request was suggested once before, but the UserVoice admins declined it with no explanation: https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-general-feedback/suggestions/124647-stopwords-in-searches-specific-to-a-forum.
Admins: please, if you're going to decline a feature request a short comment explaining why or what the workaround / mitigation is would be really nice. My company makes of point of always doing that in our _own_ UserVoice instance...
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Peter Flynn
commented
Here's a related request: defining sets of product-specific terms that all mean the same thing, so prevent two users from filing the same suggestion twice using different names for the same feature. https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-general-feedback/suggestions/15318363-custom-search-keyword-synonyms
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Clint
commented
Is it possible to get the list of current stopwords so we can tweak our articles to include more synonyms that may be ignored by the UV search engine?
Currently we are hiding synonyms (keywords) in a <div style="display:none;"> block in our articles.
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AdminJoey P
(Admin, UserVoice)
commented
The word "add" is ignored in search queries.
Product may have "add" as an important word for finding relevant articles, and needs to be taken in to account for users search queries.
Same with the word "provide".
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Brad Lang
commented
Was just about to repost this, so here's mine:
Just like short common words in http://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-general-feedback/suggestions/160842-ignore-short-common-words-when-searching-for-simil, there are a lot of other words / phrases that are generally useless / create idea duplicates. Some of these could include: allow, give us, ability to, fix, change, etc, but would still be useful under some circumstances / applications, so you obviously couldn't add them to your general list. Would it be possible to allow a per-forum custom exclude list that admins could change? Even just as a Pro feature?