We want to improve the search experience on Discourse, with “AI discover search” enabled out of the box on our hosting, and a user experience that encourages using natural language where they can be more descriptive about what they’re looking for, and follow up on search results in a conversational interface
We think this will also be an opportunity to create better feedback loops for admins to understand what people are searching for, and where there are gaps.
We have some more concrete, shorter term goals in mind, and some more ambiguous opportunities we want to explore while we’re in the area.
Here are some things we expect to come out of this project:
-
Improvements to the user experience of the existing “AI discover search” feature
We’ll be taking a closer look at the details of the current feature and polishing rough edges. -
Enable the feature by default on our hosting
Once we’re more confident we have a user experience we’re happy with being on by default, and can deliver the performance required at scale for this feature, we’ll turn it on by default. This will also help us get more feedback about additional improvements we want to make -
Add ability to ask follow up questions
Today, some people lean on the AI bot for search. We want to eliminate the up front decision about whether to search using the search box or the AI bot by making it possible to ask follow up questions directly in search. -
Improve search reporting for admins
We want to make it easier for admins to understand what people are searching for – not only as keywords, but conceptually.
We don’t expect this to be a straight road to travel. There will be things we discover along the way, in particular as we wrestle with how to introduce new ways to search without being too disruptive to folks exercising the habits they’ve built up over time with keyword search. There will also be tricky things to figure out when it comes to what level of parity we offer for filtering search results.
Plenty to figure out along the way and we are likely to add or cut scope as we learn more. But we’re gonna start digging in.