INGENIOUS: Central Focus on Search, in the style of GetSatisfaction.com

[donnacha]

I stumbled upon a new Web service called Get Satisfaction which offers a hybrid between an FAQ and a forum, with the main emphasis upon search: you cannot simply make a post, you must first type in a question and are shown a few search results based upon existing threads that might already answer your question. If the results do not address your question, you can just continue with your post, using the question you typed as your title.

This is ingenious because it tackles head-on a problem all forums have: the same questions being asked again and again because people are too lazy to search. Having been an early advocate of forums, I eventually came to the conclusion that this was their fatal flaw: that good posts, containing valuable information, slip out of view too rapidly.

By building an awareness of existing threads right into the posting process, the Get Satisfaction interface allows everyone to build upon existing knowledge rather than start from scratch every time.

Get Satisfaction are primarily aiming their service at companies, using the slogan "People Powered Customer Service", and you can see a good example here:

Timbuk2's Customer Support Forum/FAQ, powered by Get Satisfaction

As you can see, companies are forced to have their Forum/FAQ appear within Get Satisfaction's website and, obviously, that's going to be a sticking point for most. Get Satisfaction want to become the main destination people think of when they need answers regarding any company - it's an ambitious aim and makes sense for a company desperate to recoup their investment but, unfortunately, it cripples the wider potential of this interface innovation.

If someone could find a way to replicate this interface in VB, I believe it would give a huge boost to forums on every subject, not only because it cuts down on duplicate questions and increases the shelf-life of existing content, but because, more importantly, it significantly lowers the barrier to participation: getting lurking users to post is a problem we all share, I believe that this interface is the ultimate encouragement, fundamentally changing the way users perceive forums.

Would it be difficult to apply this interface to VB? It seems to me that VB's underlying engine would be the perfect platform.

Opinions please, what do you think?

[Analogpoint]

An interesting idea. It could probably be done all in vB's plugin system, but it wouldn't be trivial.

[donnacha]

Originally Posted by Analogpoint

An interesting idea. It could probably be done all in vB's plugin system, but it wouldn't be trivial.

I am no programmer but, from what little hacking around I've done with vb, I reckon it would be easy enough to create a template that, visually at least, mimicked the Get Satisfaction interface, focusing on the "Ask a Question" box.

Harder, of course, would be then taking the question entered and both routing it to the search engine and, also, lining it up as the title for the post the user will write if the search fails to return any relevant existing threads.

The hardest bit of all, I reckon, would be finding a way to make vb's search engine interpret the questions as natural language phrases, pulling out the most important words and matching them according to how previous threads have been tagged.

Would that even be possible or would something like this be better off written from scratch?

I definitely believe, though, that this sort of functionality would revolutionize forums.

[Analogpoint]

It can definitely be done, the only thing I might be worried about is the irrelevancy of vB search results in comparison to, say, a google site: search on the same forums. Aside from that, there would be no problem taking them through to starting a thread with their same search query.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

It could be done, but as previously mentioned the relevance of threads found in the search would be the most limiting factor.

Other then that: what you describe is more aimed at a Support system (a lot of similar questions that have already been answered), where the main objective (in general) of a forum is to have discussions.

[Dean C]

I agree with Marco, and I'd love to see such a system implemented here. But the limiting factor is that vB's search feature is absolutely useless on a board with many threads and posts. MySQL's "relevance" often doesn't return what you'd expect.