Camunda Docs repo search is not working as expected

The search does not return relevant results.

This also seems to be issue with Google indexing in general as the docs have become less and less findable/searchable through google.

Good point, Stephen, I’ve noticed the same. Hopefully something can be done about it. Using the literal name of a page or some term from the headings doesn’t even provide the most relevant page as a result sometimes.

Hey Folks,

We’re aware of this problem and actually started talking recently about trying to get this search fixed.

I’ll let you know when I have more info once we have a plan in place.

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FWIW, there was a feature announcement with Antora 3.x recently that an integrated search option will be added to the statically generated site. I didn’t investigate further, but maybe the pointer is worth something for the team :slight_smile:

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This issue is a real Experience Killer for onboarding new people to the topics, docs, and answering questions in real time… would be appreciated if priority could be given to this topics much sooner than later.

This is a regression rather than just a missing feature. The docs used to google searchable and searchable in the docs search bar. At some point it broke.

@Niall is there movement on this? Whatever changes have been made to the docs website have essentially killed all searchability from google and the Docs embedded search.

Hi @StephenOTT
At the moment all of our resources regarding improvements to the docs are currently prioritizing docs.camunda.io since it needs a lot more attention. So the prioritization of the search function for docs.camunda.org has unfortunately dropped down a bit.

So this means that non-cloud docs support is being support-abandoned? I don’t want that to sound overtly negative here, but we are talking about general searchability/findability for the current public release and previous releases: all of which are essentially non-findable right now.

It’s not at all being abandoned, and trust me - I know how important this this first hand - but at the moment the limited resources we have are prioritizing outstanding topics on camunda.io but there’s no reason to think they wont then go back to this topic when it’s done.

Hi Folks - we have @steven.hicks looking into this issue. What I’m missing (and I know exists somewhere on the internets) is a few terms that we know should return search results but either don’t entirely or return irrelevant results.

Can you help me with a few more examples?

I want to continue to reiterate that these docs aren’t abandoned, but we do have a small team and issues like this are often bigger than they appear.

Hi Folks - I want to provide an update here.

We started to dig deeper into this issue and it’s not exactly a quick fix.

We are running into an SEO issue, specifically with Google when we talk about the embedded search in our docs, since it is powered by Google. Google declared canonicals from versions we remove from indexing which makes them virtually inaccessible to internal or external searches.

We are working to fix this but we do not have an ETA for when to expect this to be fixed. Additionally, we are using what we learn from this situation to inform us on how to prevent this with out C8 docs site.

I know it’s taken us a while to revisit this, but the team supporting docs infrastructure is quite small and this issue didn’t exactly present itself in an obvious or intuitive way.

It has taken a tremendous amount of lift, but based on internal feedback from teams like Support, I’m confident we can say this has improved and both embedded search and search from Google into the Camunda Platform 7 docs works as intended. You should be able to find with you need.

For those interested in details, the Google crawler powers the embedded search and we had rampant SEO issues without a proper sitemap for the latest version of the docs. Adding that and asking Google to recrawl was on Google’s schedule.

I want to give the biggest shout out to @steven.hicks for working through this. We’re already in the process of taking the learnings to the Camunda Platform 8 docs.

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