Would Faceted Search Assist Your Users?

Google’s search engine pars­es through mil­lions of web pages and still deliv­ers amaz­ing search results.

Still, even Google’s search algo­rithm has its lim­its. With more and more web con­tent avail­able every day, you can see why Google offered addi­tion­al fil­ters to help you nar­row your search results. For exam­ple, if you’re look­ing for pic­tures of pump­kins, you can type “pump­kins” in the search field and click Images. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you’re inter­est­ed in the lat­est books about Thanks­giv­ing, you can search for that term and click Books.

Com­pa­nies, such as Dell, have used this technique—called faceted search—for some time.  For exam­ple, on Dell’s web site you can search for a lap­top or desk­top com­put­er. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can use the fil­ters to help you search by prod­uct cat­e­go­ry, proces­sor, screen size, weight, and so on.

For users, this pro­vides a lot of ben­e­fits includ­ing the abil­i­ty to be much more spe­cif­ic when look­ing for cer­tain types of content.

Faceted Search and Tech­ni­cal Communication

There has not been a lot of dis­cus­sion about faceted search and tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I believe that if your help sys­tem is large (for exam­ple, more than 500 top­ics), a faceted search could help your users search by top­ic type (such as trou­bleshoot­ing con­tent, pro­ce­dures, and con­cep­tu­al mate­r­i­al), train­ing vs. tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­tent, HTML ver­sus PDF guides, and so on.

There are, how­ev­er, a few prob­lems with using faceted search with the cur­rent Help Author­ing Tools.

First, most Help Author­ing Tools don’t offer faceted search. So unless you’re using a tool that does offer the func­tion­al­i­ty, you won’t be able to pro­vide it to your users. It’s worth men­tion­ing that Mad­Cap Flare does offer a form of faceted search in its product.

Sec­ond, in my expe­ri­ence, the search in Help Author­ing Tools isn’t great. For many years, Google’s search engine has set the stan­dard for find­ing con­tent online. In con­trast, the out-of-the box search found in a Help Author­ing Tool is mediocre.

Third, I find it’s hard to cus­tomize the search engine in a Help Author­ing Tool. RoboHelp’s search does allow you to tweak con­tent but the last time I looked into it, the search engine is large­ly a black box that isn’t meant to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly customized.

What do you think? Would faceted search help your users? Should it be it avail­able in all Help Author­ing Tools?