Finding Questions and Answers
We are now going to look at how you can find questions and answers within RefTracker. We will look at the full Search capabilities of RefTracker, in regard to finding both open and closed questions in either the work or knowledge bases.
Open Questions and Search, in the main header bar, are where you find things!
- Open questions provides a number of ways to view the current workload of questions requiring answers – go to Open questions to find work to do!
- Search provides a number of ways to find both open and closed questions, and well as providing access to your Saved searches, if you have any.
Note that if you already know the number of a question that you want to work on, there is no need to search for it. You can enter that question number in the Question number box in the Question action bar, and hit Enter. You will be shown the Details tab of the Summary screen for that question (which will verify that the correct question has been found), and you can then use any question action bar menu item on that question number.
The following provides some general things that you need to know about searching in RefTracker.
Proximity relevance searching
RefTracker uses a proximity relevance search, like Google.
Proximity relevance searching means that the search will first AND all of the provided search terms, then OR them all.
The results of these searches are then ranked for relevancy according to how close the provided words appears to each other in the returned records, and presented with the most relevant results at the top of the results list.
So, your results will have results where the most occurrences of search word/s appear closest together, at the top, followed by results where the word/s appear increasingly further apart, followed by results where fewer of the word/s appear increasing further apart, until eventually it is returning results where only one of the words appears.
RefTracker uses the SQL CONTAINSTABLE construct to preform this search and then applies a weighting for the number of tables that the search terms was found in.
The CONTAINSTABLE routine has a component of how recent the returned result is, but takes a lot of other things into account, so, if you want most recent results at the top, just click the Open date column heading.
Constructing searches in RefTracker using proximity relevance searching
YOU CAN SEARCH BY
- Word
- Several words (they are ANDed together then ORed and results are presented in proximity relevance order)
- Phrase (“surround it with quotes”)
- Stem wildcard * that allows for word stem searching * e.g. world* that will find: world, worldly, worldwide, etc.
- A phrase that includes words and wildcards
YOU CANNOT SPECIFICALLY SEARCH FOR
- Capitals (they are treated as lower case)
- Punctuation (they are treated as spaces) – the * wild card is treated as punctuation if is occurs anywhere other than at the end of a search term
- Any single character
- Stop words (e.g. the, then, and, as, of, etc.)
When constructing searches in RefTracker (in any of the Search screens), knowing about these search rules will enable you to obtain the best results:
| Search for | |
|---|---|
| fish | finds only questions and answers containing the exact word fish |
| fish* | finds fish and fisherman, fishing, etc |
| *fish | finds only fish as wildcards anywhere other than at the end of a search term are treated as punctuation |
| big fish | finds any questions and answers containing BOTH the words big AND fish, OR either of these words. The results will be ordered according to how close these words appear together, then results where only one of the words appears. It finds big fish, fish that are big, big load of fish, big, fish, etc. |
| big* fish* | finds any questions and answers containing BOTH words starting with big AND fish, OR words starting with either of these words. The results will be ordered according to how close these word stems appear together, then results where only one of the word stems appear. It finds big fish, biggest fishes, big finish, fish that are big, big load of fish, biggest fishes, big, biggest, fish, fishing, etc. |
| “big fish” | finds only questions and answers containing the word big immediately followed by the word fish |
| “big* fish*” | finds only questions and answers with the first word starting with big, immediately followed by a word beginning with fish e.g. questions with the phrases big fish, biggest fishes, big finish, etc. |
| big fish! | finds the same results as big fish because the punctuation is treated as a space |
| Big Fish | finds the same results as big fish because the capitals are ignored |
| leaving the words box empty (or just entering one character, or only a stop word) will result in all questions in the database being returned (depending on what other parameters you use). It produces a browse.All punctuation is treated like a space and so forms the end of a word.Single quotes are automatically converted to double quotes and indicate a phrase. | |
| of | and other common words like the gives no results because it is a stop word |
| 425-22 | technically, searching for 425-22 will result in a search for 425 AND/OR 22, but it will still find 425-22 with the highest relevancy |
| sforster@altarama.com | searching for sforster@altarama.com will actually result in a search for “sforster@altarama.com” because RefTracker knows that the punctuation in email addresses means it needs to be searched for as a phrase. If your client base all use the same domain just searching for the part before the domain (sforster*) will give you the right results with less typing! If you are searching for a client’s email address using Open questions or the Simple search, make sure Scope “Client” is selected in your parameters so the system looks in the client contact details table. |
Searching for hash tags
Some customers like to use hash tags to increase the search-ability of existing responses. As the # hash symbol is a punctuation mark, SQL server ignores it when indexing question. This means that a search for a hash tag like #Formula1 will return all instances of Formula1. However as an aid for this specific type of search if you search for #Formula1 the system will return the same results as for Formula1 but will ONLY highlight results for #Formula1.
Searching for @Formula1 (and other words starting with a punctuation character) will find instances of Formula1 and @Formula1 but will not highlight the @Formula1 hits.
Searching in Chinese
In Chinese words can consist of a single character, a pair of characters or multiple characters. The end of a word is not designated by a space as occurs in English. For this reason, searching in Chinese must be different. When a Chinese search term is passed to the search engine, RefTracker does the following.
– Breaks it into ‘words’ (as usual) using spaces.
– Checks each word to see if there is a Chinese character present. If present, a wild card is inserted before each Chinese ‘word’ (i.e. string of Chinese characters separated by spaces) and a wild card is inserted after each Chinese ‘word’. So a search for 衛生教 would automatically become *衛生教* and find that group of character inserted anywhere in a question or Answer, no matter what precedes them or follows them.
Support for searching the full range of UNICODE characters is built into RefTracker. No need to load special search collations for languages other than English – just go ahead and search for any characters in any UNICODE supported language.
Attachment searching
All customers can include a Search of attachment names, and an optional module can be added for a small fee to extend Searching to include the textual content of a wide range of attachment file types.
Customers with just the attachment name searching will see an“Attachment name” tick box in the Text searching column. Tick this box to include attachment names in your Search for the text you provide in the Word(s) box. Untick the other boxes under Words(s) if you ONLY want to search for attachment names.
Searching attachments uses exactly the same proximity relevance search technology as you are used to using in RefTracker, so “phrases” and wildcards (*) are supported.
As with other searching, adding other Search terms limits the search – so, for example, to just search attachments to questions in the Knowledge base, select Database “Knowledge base” as an additional search term.
Search results show all questions where the search term was found. In the example below you can see that there are several questions where attachments have the search term in their name.
Where a customer purchases the additional Attachment Content Searching module (see more information about this module at Parameter 80.40), the Search functionality provides an “Attachments” tick box (instead of the “Attachments name” tick box) that when ticked will include both the attachment name and the contents of a wide range of attachment types in the search for the text provided in the Word(s) box. The minimum supported file types (and those provided to Altarama hosted customers that purchase this module) include .pdf, .htm, .html, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .xlm and many more – but do NOT include image files like .jpg and .gif. Filters are available for other file formats when this module is installed by in-house customers. Even though only certain types of files (types) provide content that can be searched, the names of all attachments of all types are searched.
Where a question matches the search criteria, its Question attachments show in the Search results screen, and so do Answer attachments where the answer is complete. Where the answer is not complete, you will need to go to the Answer tab, or History tab, for that question to see the attachments. Where the text is in a Workflow attachment, you can access that workflow attachment from the History screen.
It is not possible at this stage to highlight the attachment in which the text was found, if it was found in an attachment, but enhancements to this Attachment searching functionality are expected in future releases and we look forward to feedback from our customers about additional features we can provide to utilise the full power of the body of attachments that you have in RefTracker.