[oconnore]

It seems like there ought to be some recognition that these are business tools, and ought to be designed with power users in mind. Instead, "search" in B2B products is built with the same uber-minimalist UX as B2C search.

Even early Google had more power user features than a typical B2B product search bar.

Boolean expressions (NOT, OR, AND), exact match strings, links-to, linked-from, in-folder/category, etc. should be mandatory for these workflows. Better if you can include search queries as live page content, as in Notion & Height.

[polote]

Knowledge management is still a neglected area in most of companies. No money => a few players. Confluence has been there for years with almost no competition. Notion has emerged recently but is not really a good fit for medium to large companies. As a result Confluence is not worried and doesn't have to improve its product.

Power users are a small share of users of knowledge management software, so it is difficult to build a system only for them. Most people just type a few words and give up if they don't find the result in the 5 first results.

[oconnore]

> Power users are a small share of users of knowledge management software, so it is difficult to build a system only for them

In practice, knowledge management at companies is a specialization. There are <5% of employees that go around and document/organize things for everyone else. Most employees are passively consuming information and information hierarchies built by someone else.

If you're not building tools for those power users, you're not building for creating and organizing content in your system at all.

As an example of how nuts this is, managers at my company regularly try out various search terms, create index documents, and do "internal SEO" to optimize how other employees will discover documents. This isn't a byzantine environment like public web search is, why do I have to hack around the wiki's default notion of page relevance?

[polote]

Well it depends of what you are talking about. Usually people who produce contents are power users. But people who search content as you said are the 95% of others users, these are the ones who also needs a search relevant to them.

My belief is that knowledge management can't exist without power users, which we call "admins", these are the ones responsible to make sure content is well organized for others and create content if necessary. Those people need specific tools to do their job well, which to me is more something that you can have in an admin interface while all the users use the basic interface.

Those tools have two sets of users, admins (curators, creators, organizers) and regular users. We need a different interface for both. And that's exactly what we are working on.

> This isn't a byzantine environment like public web search is, why do I have to hack around the wiki's default notion of page relevance?

That's exactly why I suggested to have multi titles, when you get that and you facilitate the suggestion of new titles for a document, anyone when finding a document can suggest the query terms he used, and that can benefit others users

[dragosbulugean]

We're also trying to build something in the space with www.archbee.io, a YC company.