Surface pages in search results

A lot of our process guides are split into sub-documents, one per page. So for example we might have a commonly referenced page in our corporate handbook doc “Reimbursement policy” with a recognizable icon, but if you search “Reimbursement policy” in Coda’s “Search all docs” feature, you get (among other results) the generic “Corporate Handbook” doc title and icon.

Showing pages – with their titles and icons – as results directly in Search would make it much easier to find content in Coda, and easier to navigate and orient team members to a knowledge base or repository of multi-page guides and documents.

Our team’s top complaint about Coda is still “Search doesn’t work” and it’s primarily because of this issue, so I’d like to follow up on this with a bit more context.

In Aug 2020, @AlanFang posted a great overview of the then-new improvements to search in Coda. These changes made it possible to search for a page by title, but they did not make it clear when you had successfully found a page by title. Alan pointed this limitation out in his overview then:

Note: In some cases, you may see a doc in the search results with no highlighted match. In these cases, the match is a page title.

This has the following effect:

  1. User wants to find the page “Artemis Roadmap”
  2. Type artemis roadmap into search
  3. The desired result does not seem like it contains the term “Artemis Roadmap”, even though they know for a fact there is a commonly referenced page with this title
  4. Instead of clicking on the desired page, user clicks on something else or second-guesses their search term

This has been undermining our team’s faith in Coda as a place you can put findable information.

Proposed Solution

While it would be great if the top-level search result’s title was the page title and it’s icon, it would still help a lot if the search result text contained something like “Page: Artemis Roadmap” highlighted. Right now correct page title search results look like they’re irrelevant.

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Now that Coda 3.0 has launched and there may be some planning of what improvements to take on next, I figured I’d take another stab at illustrating this problem where pages are hard to find in search, and what a potential fix could be.

I also wanted to ask: given that there haven’t been any replies to this thread, are we the only ones using Coda instead of something like Notion for company handbooks, process guides, and the like?

I don’t see how not being able to find topics within a doc isn’t frustrating many other Codans. Why write a page if nobody can find it? Are people doing a single-page Doc for every important page maybe? Or creating some kind of “pointer” doc to help people find important pages?

Or are teams that want to build guides and handbooks like this for their team choosing Notion instead, self-selecting the population of Coda users to mostly care about tables rather than team-facing written docs like these? :thinking:

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We are experiencing pain with the search feature too. We are using Coda in a similar way and it’s very unexpected why the search feature is functioning as you mention. We have the exact same problem and it’s a rising core reason responsible for our employees’ frustration with coda. Discoverability/search is a core requirement for us.

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Sadly I cannot really comment on the actual search functionality in Coda (because I’m a new user, and don’t know that many details about how the search function works in Coda). I know that I don’t really have any knowledge of how you design your pages, and what information goes into them. For all I know, you have already covered this, but here are some ideas that perhaps could be worth looking into:

  • would linking relevant pages together with the “@” help in both usability and discoverability and would it possibly affect the search functions in any way?
  • Would it be possible to add some sort of tag system to your pages, so that when searching for relevant keywords, there is an increased chance of relevant pages showing in the search results?

Hopefully someone from Coda or perhaps some of the Coda experts can give some useful tips…

Hope you find a solution that works for you.

The big problem with Coda’s search, in our experience, is not that the search algorithm can’t find relevant pages, it’s that search is incapable of displaying what pages it found. That is, the pages are found, but there is no functionality to show a page in search results – instead the top-level doc’s name and icon appear. So the result was found, but users can’t tell it was found.

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I experienced this huge bug again today. I was looking for a document I created 3 days ago.

  1. It doesn’t come back in search at all, even if I search for the literal exact name of the page.
  2. It doesn’t show up Docs, which lists all the things I’ve viewed.
  3. It’s not listed in “owned by me” even though I created that page 3 days ago

I happened to eventually find it by clicking around and luckily stumbled on it. The root issue is this bug. The “page” was a sub-document that was 4 levels deep of a broader company “teams” page. Looking again, in step 2 I did have an entry for “Company Teams” page, but that is meaningless as there are hundreds of documents underneath that page.

This type of discoverability is a show stopper for us. Had I not stumbled upon the document it would have been completely lost in coda - which is really the death of a documentation platform. I’m highly concerned this will become a pervasive issue as the company adopts usage of the platform more.

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The problems w/ Coda’s “Search all docs” is my #1 complaint. And the results seem to get worse (less relevant) when you add more than one word. It’s like the search does an OR instead of an AND or something.