Forum: Testing Semantic Search and Related Topics

[popstarfreas]

Discourse recently added support for some ai-based improvements. (Introducing Discourse AI).

To start out I enabled the semantic search and related topics features, to see if they are useful and how many resources it takes to use them.

I’ve enabled semantic search, which shows up here (after you press enter on a search query, you get taken to the full search page with this dropdown):

and related topics, mostly replacing suggested topics:

They are intended to be more relevant to the topic you are in.

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Personally, I find search to still be lacking. Even after recent improvements.

Yesterday I searched for “Zombies Abilities” and the guide was ranked 5/6, even though the title is an exact match. Today, I bumped up the priority for guides, but it’s still not #1. And semantic search does not find it.

Maybe people can tell whether semantic search or normal search is more useful in finding what they wanted.

[GlasiaVD23 (Glasia)]

I agree that it is good but not very good (in school marks somewhere a C to B-)

also an example where the searched thread matched the title AND had much more views than the 2 help threads.

[popstarfreas]

And then there’s this:

It’s almost like it’s broken because I fail to see how those are even related to the search.

[GlasiaVD23 (Glasia)]

Maybe the time will show, i. e. over time the discourse devs are improving the semantic search.

[popstarfreas]

If you use normal search do you get this?

Because it seems to not find the right topic at all for me.

(Update: Running reindex to see if that does anything at all)
(No, same result)

[GlasiaVD23 (Glasia)]

This is what I get (phone, long screenshot on chrome)

[twofoursixeight]

Linking Discourse Meta response to this topic:

Difficulties with search - not finding a topic with the same title as search...