Search and discovery
Users shouldn't have to browse through categories to find an answer. Search surfaces the right article instantly — and the better your articles are written, the better results your users get.
The help center is an experimental feature. Enable the helpCenter flag in Admin > Settings > Experimental before using any help center features.
How search works
Your help center uses a hybrid approach that combines two complementary search strategies:
Keyword search (40% weight) — PostgreSQL full-text search on article titles and content. Fast and precise for exact terms. Works without any external services.
Semantic search (60% weight) — Vector similarity search using OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small model and pgvector. Understands meaning, not just words. A user searching "can't log in" will match an article titled "Reset your password" even though the words don't overlap.
The two scores are combined and ranked. The result is search that handles both "what's my API rate limit" and "why is my data not updating" equally well.
Without OPENAI_API_KEY, search falls back to keyword matching only. It still works, but it won't understand natural language queries or synonyms.
Where search appears
Search is available in three places:
- Help center homepage — The main search bar users see when they visit your help center
- Widget help tab — Embedded search inside the feedback widget, so users can find answers without leaving your app
- Admin article list — Filter your own articles by keyword while managing content
How embeddings are generated
When you create or update an article, Quackback automatically generates a vector embedding for it using text-embedding-3-small. The embedding captures the semantic meaning of the title and content as a 1536-dimensional vector stored in pgvector.
You don't need to trigger this manually. Save an article and the embedding updates in the background.
The same OPENAI_API_KEY used for other AI features in Quackback (AI responses, summaries) powers the embeddings. There's no separate key to configure.
Optimize articles for search
Search quality depends on how your articles are written. A few practices make a real difference:
Use clear, keyword-rich titles. Titles get the most weight. "Reset your password" beats "Account access issues" for users searching "forgot password."
Write meaningful descriptions. Descriptions appear in search results. A good description answers the article's core question in one sentence, which helps users pick the right result without opening every link.
Use headings to structure content. Headings break long articles into scannable sections and add more keyword surface area for full-text search.
Write titles the way your users would phrase a question. If they'd type "how do I cancel my subscription", a title like "Cancel your subscription" matches that intent directly.