Table of Contents
- Why Search Matters in SaaS Documentation
- ExpertRec: Built for Fast and User-Friendly Documentation Search
- Quick Quiz: Is Your Documentation Search Supporting or Obstructing Your Users?
- Algolia DocSearch: Popular Among Developer-Focused Documentation
- Elasticsearch: Maximum Flexibility with Maximum Responsibility
- Which Search Solution Is Best for SaaS Documentation?
- Why Many SaaS Teams Are Choosing ExpertRec
- Final Thoughts
Site search for SaaS documentation can be an important part of quickly providing users with the answers they are seeking. If a user spends minutes trying to find an answer in your SaaS documentation, they are likely to be unhappy with the result, which may lead to more support tickets or them stopping using your SaaS products. For this reason, providing users with a reliable and fast way to find answers to their questions in their SaaS documentation must be a top priority for all companies considering the implementation of site search functionality in their SaaS applications.
The next section of this document contains a detailed comparison between the three most common ways to conduct a search within SaaS documentation – ExpertRec, Algolia DocSearch, and Elasticsearch.
| Feature | ExpertRec | Algolia DocSearch | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup Difficulty | Easy | Moderate | Complex |
| Coding Required | Minimal | Moderate | High |
| AI-Powered Search | Yes | Limited | Depends on implementation |
| Synonym Support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Typo Tolerance | Yes | Yes | Requires configuration |
| Custom Ranking | Yes | Yes | Fully customizable |
| Maintenance Effort | Low | Low to Medium | High |
| Best For | SaaS teams wanting quick deployment | Open-source and developer documentation | Large enterprises with technical teams |
Why Search Matters in SaaS Documentation
Most people will look to the documentation first when they have an issue before reaching out for help with customer support. If you are having trouble integrating with other systems, troubleshooting errors, or finding new features, you expect the search functionality to give you quick access to solve your issue.
If your search experience doesn’t go well, then your support costs will be higher than those of others who used search to get their solutions; you may also be less satisfied as a result. A great search experience means your customers become successful faster, and it reduces the amount of time your customer service representatives spend supporting customers.
ExpertRec: Built for Fast and User-Friendly Documentation Search
For companies needing fast, effective documentation search solutions, ExpertRec is the solution. Many organizations take weeks (if not months) to build out their own document search solution. Instead, by implementing ExpertRec’s advanced search solution into their existing software applications, any type of company can leverage the benefits associated with an expert-level search solution.
One of the main advantages of using ExpertRec as a search solution is that it can determine the intent of users. ExpertRec handles misspellings, synonyms, and tuning for relevance automatically when searches return results. For example, when a user searches for “API Authentication”, they will also receive results for “API Login Setup” because of the connection between the words, even though the user did not enter both terms.
SaaS applications that have outgrown their original search solutions due to an increase in size can use ExpertRec as a means by which to reintroduce those features to their users. As a result, your teams can put more time and energy into improving the quality of your documentation instead of managing your search infrastructure.
Short Quiz: Is Your Documentation Search Supporting or Obstructing Your Users?
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do users create a lot of support tickets for information that was already documented?
- Do users have problems finding information because they have misspelled a technical term?
- Do users get many records that are not relevant when searching your documentation?
- Is your team spending a lot of time keeping the search functionality up-to-date?
- Are users exiting out of documentation pages quickly?
If you answered “yes” to three or more of those questions, then enhancing your Documentation Search may be something you should do.
AI-powered documentation search for SaaS teams
Help users find answers faster with ExpertRec Documentation Search
ExpertRec improves SaaS documentation search with typo tolerance, synonym matching, intelligent relevance ranking, and AI-powered search results—helping users find answers quickly while reducing support tickets.
Quick setup • AI-powered relevance • Minimal maintenance
Algolia DocSearch: Popular Among Developer-Focused Documentation
Algolia’s DocSearch is growing in popularity among developers for searching through developer-centric documentation. Because it is very quick and has a polished look that is very appealing to your technical population. Due to its ability to index structured documents and deliver results in what’s often near real-time, you should be able to rely heavily on DocSearch as an option for your engineering-focused technical team’s search capability.
One of the biggest surprises for many organizations is that customizing DocSearch takes a lot more development work than they anticipated, over and above what would be necessary for different configuration items to rank their documents and allow them to meet the indexing rules that will keep their content relevant as their document increases in size.
As long as your organization has a substantial amount of documentation on a SaaS-type product and a committed development resource, DocSearch should continue to be a viable option for your organization.
Elasticsearch: Maximum Flexibility with Maximum Responsibility
For businesses that need to implement a search solution, Elasticsearch is often the go-to source because it is a highly flexible way for organizations to have an extensive amount of control over their search functionality. Its degree of customization allows for nearly any type of search experience to be developed using Elasticsearch.
While it does provide a great deal of flexibility, there are significant levels of complexity when it comes to building an effective documentation search with Elasticsearch. A company that decides to use Elasticsearch will require a considerable level of technical expertise to successfully utilize Elasticsearch for building a search solution, including knowledge about various indexing paradigms, optimizing queries, managing infrastructure, and continuing to maintain the Elasticsearch instance on a daily basis.
Many software-as-a-service vendors have been able to produce superior results through the use of Elasticsearch, but have found themselves using a disproportionate number of engineering resources to maintain Elasticsearch when those resources could have been put to better use on continuing to build their products.
Elasticsearch can be an excellent choice for large organizations that develop a wide array of products where dedicated search teams exist to support the projects. In contrast, small software-as-a-service businesses require much less of the performance capabilities that Elasticsearch offers.
Which Search Solution Is Best for SaaS Documentation?
The ideal solution for searching through SaaS documentation will depend on what you are trying to achieve.
If setting up an efficient, high-quality search for documents quickly will be your top priority with very little maintenance, then using ExpertRec might be better since you won’t have to hire a dedicated developer just to implement intelligent searching functionality.
However, if you are developing your documentation for a developer mindset and your team is willing to put in additional configuration & maintenance time, then you might prefer using Algolia DocSearch.
Finally, if you desire complete flexibility or complete control over your infrastructure via your own Elasticsearch implementation or cluster, then Elasticsearch has no equal for providing you with that type of versatility, but requires that you build and maintain it correctly.
Why Many SaaS Teams Are Choosing ExpertRec
As SaaS docs continue to expand, the need for end-user-friendly search technology without excessive complexity will also increase.
ExpertRec provides a highly usable search solution by offering great usability (intelligent searching), simple setup, and minimal maintenance requirements.
By using ExpertRec, you can spend less time worrying about your search array infrastructure and can concentrate more on improving your documentation, so your users’ requests will be satisfied.
If you want to increase the speed at which your users receive a response to a question, reduce the number of support tickets your users create, and improve the rate at which your product is adopted by your users, consider ExpertRec to be your organization’s documentation search solution.
Final Thoughts
With a document search engine, you can give users quick and accurate answers to their questions. If your organization needs a way to find documents, this is an excellent solution!
Algolia’s DocSearch has many great features for search functionality. However, most SaaS developers will benefit from spending most of their time on developing Usability, Maintainability, and Relevancy Optimization in order to increase performance.
Ultimately, the best choice for SaaS Companies who want greater productivity and provide their users with a better searchable documents experience with as little work as possible is to use ExpertRec.
