Search and reader feedback
Understand what readers look for and whether articles help.
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Beta: reports on searches with no results are in development.
When to use
Use this to judge how well your articles perform: which are viewed most, and which readers rate as not helpful. It is the starting point for deciding what to rewrite.
Before you start
- Reading articles, search and reports needs
kb:read. - Search covers keyword and semantic matching over published articles and documents.
- Outside readers of the public portal cannot comment or send feedback; feedback comes from signed-in users.
Steps
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Readers use search on
/knowledge/kb; keyword and semantic search both run across articles and documents. -
At the end of an article, a signed-in reader marks it helpful or not helpful (one vote per user).
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Open /knowledge/reports to review views, popular articles and reader feedback.
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Use articles with poor feedback as your editing backlog and republish after fixing.
Tips & common mistakes
- The report shows views, popular articles and feedback. Reporting of searches that returned no results is not available yet because search logs are not stored.
- Do not read a few votes as a trend; look at articles with consistently poor feedback.
- Improve titles and the first paragraph first: they drive both search matching and reader trust.
- Public portal visitors cannot rate articles, so their opinion will not appear in the scores.