The Jazz.net team has replaced the site’s old search with a new search engine and a new UI. While the full site search is operational, we are planning enhancements over time. You can help us prioritize these enhancements by using the search feature, and providing us with feedback on what you might like to see in the future.

Although our new search engine encompasses data from all areas of the site, the stand-alone search facilities for our blog, forums, wiki, and RTC apps are still available for use.

What You’ll See Today

Our initial deployment is focused on parity of search results, with a few useful additions:

• Our redesigned UI breaks down search results by category, in addition to providing the traditional “All Results” view. Category names are clearly displayed, along with a total of how many matches were found in that specific category. Site visitors can quickly scan to see where they might find the most useful pages, whether they are searching for product information or assistance with a deployment problem.

• Relevance determination has been rebalanced. Product and download pages are deemed more relevant than a document with the same matching terms in another category. Additionally, documents containing the search terms in the title are given more weight – which sometimes produces unexpected results! Document scoring is an inexact science, and we expect to be tuning our scoring methods as we receive user feedback.
• Work items in public Rational Team Concert repositories are now indexed along with the rest of the site, and are searched along with regular site documents.

This last item utilizes Rational Team Concert’s built-in OSLC and REST APIs. We are using these public APIs to programmatically discover a list of public repositories, and to access the relevant work items in each repository.

While the number of public repositories means the initial index took some time to run, the ease of running specific queries against the APIs makes detecting recent changes in the repositories relatively painless. To illustrate the difference: indexing all public work items takes 10-12 hours, while indexing those work items changed in the last 5 days takes between 5 and 20 minutes. The ability to use the APIs to filter our requests allows us to add data quickly, efficiently, and frequently.

Documentation for the OSLC and REST APIs is available through our wiki.

What’s Around the Corner

Currently we are working on adding the ability to filter by author/commenter. A set of results will include a list of the people most frequently mentioned in the documents returned by the search, such as work item owners, blog authors, and forum posters. Clicking on a person’s name will narrow the result set to those documents to which that person is related.

Future changes will involve continued relevancy tuning as appropriate, further filters to help users narrow down search results, and UI improvements, including the ability to configure how many results are displayed on a single page.

How You Can Help

Our new search mechanism is still in beta. We are interested in feedback from YOU, our community, on what you do and do not like about the new setup. Like the rest of our site content, the search engine and its UI are living things, and we plan on continuing to make incremental changes and improvements based on user feedback. Please contact us at webmaster@jazz.net with comments, suggestions, and bug reports.