Refining the Search Experience: Macromedia's New Knowledge Base

 
Dec 01, 2004
by Ryan Hartwich

Macromedia has recently released an update to the search mechanism on their website (www.macromedia.com). While leaving intact the traditional Google based document search engine, a significantly enhanced search tool dubbed the Macromedia Knowledge Base (http://www.macromedia.com/support) has been added.

On the front page of the Macromedia website, there is a white search box in the upper right hand corner. This is not the Knowledge Base (KB). For some bizarre reason Macromedia has chosen to hide the KB elsewhere on the site. I suspected that this was done to differentiate the generic but 'tested' search from the just out of beta KB. Frankly, I found it a little confusing and difficult to find the KB the first few times I looked for it. After a while I became used to finding it under the /support directory (click on the Support button from the menu at the top of any Macromedia page). You should be aware that in some places, the KB is referred to as Guided Search. According to Macromedia, the KB is not a replacement but an enhancement to the existing Google-based search and both will coexist (hence the usual search box on the main page). The Knowledge Base will focus on technical content only (intended for developers) while being enhanced through user interaction and staff research.

The Knowledge Base opening Screen:
So how does the KB rate? Late one night, while trying out the tool, it failed to find any results for 'cfmail' in ColdFusion. Leaving off the 'cf' in cfmail didn't help either. Searching for just 'mail' in All Products helped immensely to find results, though they obviously were not what I was looking for. Turns out a few things were missed in the rollout and have since been fixed. Later tests bare this out.

What does the KB offer that the original search did not? Smarter searches. A simple analogy would be the dictionary. If you want to find the word 'extrapolate', you look the word up directly. However, what happens if you don't know the word you are looking for but you have the basic gist of it, a synonym? You need either a thesaurus, more time, or the ability to look for your synonym in all of the definitions in the dictionary. The KB attempts to do this for you by combining analytics, customer feedback, and, in some cases, hard coding by the wise and learned. Macromedia is able to tailor the search to be more specific and accurate than a pure text search.

When they were looking for a search engine program to power the KB, Macromedia chose Kanisa (www.kanisa.com), a maker of analytic search tools. Even though Kanisa offers a standard web service-based front end to their application, Macromedia preferred to keep a consistent website interface by using XSL transformations and ColdFusion (running on JRun).

After entering your search term, you are presented with 5 main sections: Activity, Symptom, Product Versions, Environment, and the typical article/description that you are used to. In the case of CFMail, you can dig through 36 possible articles, or, if you know you are having performance problems with CFMAIL, you can click on the 'High CPU Utilization (3)' link to show you just the 3 relevant articles you are looking for. As expected, the first of the 3 links was exactly what I was looking for. The search isn't perfect, but clearly Macromedia has put in a great deal of effort into the KB during the past year of development.

The search for information on CFMAIL through the Knowledge Base:

I'm not convinced that the KB is fully optimized at this point. Granted, I have been having connectivity issues at home, but a number of my searches were not always as helpful (or timely) as I would have liked. Take, for instance, my search for the CFSETTING tag and in particular the enableCFoutputOnly parameter. I didn't remember the name of the CFSETTING tag, but I knew there was a tag that would allow output only within a CFOutput block. I tried searching for CFOUTPUT & Only?.no luck. A few other combinations were worthless. After a few minutes 'cfsetting' went through my mind and I used Dreamweaver's CF reference to find the CFSETTING tag. With that knowledge in mind I tried the KB again. The 5 results returned by searching for enableCFoutputOnly were less than helpful, as was those for CFSetting. Thankfully, CFML is typically logical and easy to read and the parameter is pretty self explanatory. Future searches ran extremely quickly, alleviating my performance concerns, but did not always display results by sub categories.

A quick search for 'registration' in Captivate proved fruitless. In All Products, 83 results were found. 'Serial' has only 1 result (a free upgrade) for Captivate, 100+ for all products.

I checked with Macromedia on my perceived lack of accurate results. You will be happy to hear that even with 6,000 plus Tech Notes (though not the ancient archived tidbits from obsolete software) and assorted other documents indexed, the Knowledge Base is far from complete. To make it the best it can be for developers there are two more phases of the rollout planned for the coming months. Future enhancements will include "even more content types, dynamic tech notes, and display of published dates," and for those of you who are reading this article through a translator, localization is planned! How can you help out? Use it. Through constant use and direct feedback (www.macromedia.com/bin/kb_feedback.cgi), the engine can be tuned to display more accurate results.

My immediate observation is that the KB, and in particular the 'advanced options,' is pretty cool. It's fast, helps to narrow my search results dramatically, and as a developer has a higher likelihood of displaying the answers I am looking for relative to the generic Google search. Is it perfect? No, but neither is code I write, particularly the first time I run it. Give it time. The KB is a great start that MM has a vested interest in improving over time (reducing technical support inquiries frees staff to better answer your calls in a timely fashion and build better products!).

Where does this leave you, the casual coder or uber geek? Closer to where you want to be ... solving your MM problems quickly (and less painfully) so you can get back to Halo 2/Half-Life/GTA San Andreas.
A special thank you to Jonathan Snyder, Amy Brooks, Heather Hollaender Miller and others at Macromedia who contributed information for this article and took the time to answer questions.

Privacy | FAQ | Site Map | About | Guidelines | Contact | Advertising | What is ColdFusion?
House of Fusion | ColdFusion Jobs | Blog of Fusion | AHP Hosting