We’re excited to announce that we’ve added Algolia search to our documentation. The new search experience should make it easier to search our knowledge base and find what you need.
The new search should be a big improvement on our old search, but it might not be perfect…yet! Please give it a try, and if you notice any results that seem off, comment on this thread. While we don’t have full control over Algolia’s algorithm, we can make tweaks that should improve the search experience.
Only 5 results show up per category. Usually that’s enough, but sometimes it would be useful to have a “More…” button, like in the forum search and the old docs search.
If I press Ctrl + K, type a search term, pick a result, and then press Ctrl + K again, I have to type the search term again. It would be nicer if the previous search was still there, so you don’t have to retype it each time. If you want to search for something different, you could just type over the old term. If you want to see a different result for the same search, you shouldn’t have to re-enter it.
The Recent area seems to show the pages I clicked on, not the search terms I’ve typed, and not all the pages I clicked, just some of them.
I have a 43" monitor, but the search results appear in a tiny area and I have to scroll to see them. Why not use more of the available screen space? It feels like I’m using a cell phone, not a large monitor.
Googling site:anvil.works/docs background task is still more effective than searching for background task in the docs: it shows more results, with more context, and makes better use of the available real estate.
Note the title picked up for the next to last link, which is actually to the page_size function.
Also, it doesn’t look like blog posts are being included in the search results any more? The blog post on queries was always my go to result for seeing usage examples. The API results tell me what query operators are available, but aren’t as useful as an actual set of examples.
That would probably be fixed by adding a docs page for queries that replicates and adds to what was in the blog post.
I’m also not sure what triggers the search to show multiple results on the same page versus showing more higher level results. If it’s because there aren’t enough actual results to show, that’s fine, but if it’s hiding higher level results to show more results on the same page, that seems the opposite of what it should do.
Overall, though, this seems like a nice improvement.
This does get in the way when I want to look up the official usage of a rarely-mentioned class, member, or function.
Based on the above, it seems likely that the culprit is the underscore. Which would make a limited sort of sense, if everything Algolia scanned was in Markdown format. But that’s far from the case.
I’ve made some tweaks to Algolia search that have ameliorated some of the issues. Some of the changes:
@p.colbert was right that Algolia was ignoring underscores, so I’ve changed that. Searching “list_columns” now takes you to the right page (albeit not to the right section).
Searching “query” now returns the page in the docs for querying Data Tables (but still doesn’t search the blog)
I understand there are still some UI issues, but if you see more incorrect search results, please update this thread!
