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Search: Answer Questions Rather than show results v0 #9174

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gibrown opened this issue Mar 27, 2018 · 6 comments
Open

Search: Answer Questions Rather than show results v0 #9174

gibrown opened this issue Mar 27, 2018 · 6 comments

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@gibrown
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@gibrown gibrown commented Mar 27, 2018

Many users ask questions of search boxes, and just returning what posts match is not a very effective method for having a question answering system. Example:

screen shot 2018-03-27 at 4 38 21 pm

Auto-extracting this information is not feasible right now, but we can build a system which lets the site admin index frequently asked questions and have them point at posts or even create answers.

I think a way this could work is:

  • User can attach questions to particular posts/pages which are then used for better search matching and inexactly answering questions
  • For questions for which there are no posts to answer, we could define a custom post type that matches an answer to a question.

This is not a full system, but it could make it feel like it works well, and we would gather data which would let us eventually build a fully automated system.

For indexing, we will need to:

  • define some post meta to store the questions
  • index the questions appropriately

This is related to #8895

Thanks to @notnownikki for the discussions/explorations that led to this.

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@notnownikki notnownikki commented Mar 28, 2018

Just some background on what led to this...

We have a searchable FAQ tool nicknamed Sibyl which is integrated into the wpcom contact form, and matches keywords in the customer's question to keywords in FAQs. The endpoint is /help/qanda and it's got decent test coverage in bin/tests/api-v1/suites/Help/HelpQandATest.php in the wpcom codebase, so you can see what type of results we're after when we replace the core of it with something backed by ES :)

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@gibrown gibrown commented Mar 28, 2018

Another use case came up that is kinda related to linking to arbitrary urls is that we could show results that link to an archive page. So show the full tags page when the user's query matches a tag. Or show all the posts by an author. This has been asked for before, and maybe a good way to do this would be to think of this as question answering and an automated way to build some of the responses that we want.

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@stale stale bot commented Sep 24, 2018

This issue has been marked as stale. This happened because:

  • It has been inactive in the past 6 months.
  • It hasn’t been labeled `[Pri] Blocker`, `[Pri] High`.

No further action is needed. But it's worth checking if this ticket has clear reproduction steps and it is still reproducible. Feel free to close this issue if you think it's not valid anymore — if you do, please add a brief explanation.

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@gibrown gibrown commented Dec 6, 2018

A request from a user that having a question answering system would let us do (i think):

I want to rank certain posts higher based on keyword relevance. The visitor types "wifi" and the regular results come up, but I want to ensure that result #5 is on top always (as its a featured article or story or product page).

@stale stale bot removed the [Status] Stale label Dec 6, 2018
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@gibrown gibrown commented Jan 22, 2019

This idea is also related to having lists of synonyms. We don't have a current way to indicate synonyms when doing indexing, and because changing synonyms requires completely rebuilding the ES index I don't think we would want to use the built in synonym system.

A list of synonyms has a slightly different outcome because as new content gets added the end user does not need to perform any actions to get a search to match that new term. This also means that they have very broad impact to the search (and other) results.

Allowing an admin to specify an "answer" partly solves the synonym problem, but definitely not completely.

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@stale stale bot commented Jul 21, 2019

This issue has been marked as stale. This happened because:

  • It has been inactive in the past 6 months.
  • It hasn’t been labeled `[Pri] Blocker`, `[Pri] High`.

No further action is needed. But it's worth checking if this ticket has clear reproduction steps and it is still reproducible. Feel free to close this issue if you think it's not valid anymore — if you do, please add a brief explanation.

@stale stale bot added the [Status] Stale label Jul 21, 2019
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