Environment:

Knowledge Advanced for Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

The KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget at OOTB (out of the box) Customer Portal UI is based on the simple (keyword-matching) Lucene indexes among all the published KA contents.  The Lucene indexes are being updated in real-time whenever a KA content is saved/published.  It does not cover any contents from HTTP/Web nor attachments. 

The KA Search (Ask Question) at OOTB Customer Portal UI is based on the KA Search indexes generated from the KA crawling&indexing jobs (scheduled to run automatically every 15min).  It covers all the published KA contents, attachments and HTTP/Web contents defined in the KA Search "Collection Setup" tool. Also, it will take into the consideration of all the KA Search Dictionary (Concepts/Synonyms/Intents/skipword list/...) and tunings from the "Manage Search Query" tool to return most useful/relevant results.

 

Here is a simple example to illustrate the behavior difference between the KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget and KA Search (Ask Question) at OOTB Customer Portal UI:

 

As you are typing in the keywords in the "Ask Question" field at OOTB Customer Portal UI, the KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget will be triggered to find the results (published KA contents with Title matching the typed-in keywords) in real-time where the space is treated as separator for the keywords. 

Hence, the KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget would be triggered to evaluate/return suggested answers with Title matching the OR conditions among the keywords as you are typing in the question.

For example: What is the late fee

==> 

"What" or "is"

"What" or "is" or "the"

"What" or "is" or "the" or "late"

"What" or "is" or "the" or "late" or "fee"

The KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget would simply pick/show the first 7 (default) suggested answers from the Lucene indexes with Title matching the expression above.  

Note on the skipwords: 

Since the KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget does not have skipword list, potentially Lucene indexes would return many 'matched' (but irrelevant) suggested answers because many published KA contents Title would have contained these general keywords:  "What" or "is" or "the" in their Title. Hence, it is recommended to type in precise keywords (like just "late fee" as example above) so that the KA Suggestion (okcs/OkcsSuggestions) widget may return better/more relevant suggested answers then.

 

For the KA Search, it would only be triggered when you have done typing in the complete question and hit 'Enter'.  It will then send the complete question (Like: What is the late fee) to the KA Search runtime to evaluate.  All the KA Search Dictionary (Concepts/Synonyms/Intents/skipwords list/...) and tunings from the "Manage Search Query" tool would be applied to the question to get the most useful/relevant results list. 

Note on the skipwords: 

The KA Search has OOTB skipwords list that the above "What is the late fee" question will first be skipped/reduced into just "late fee".  Then, the "late" and "fee" Concepts (Synonym to "belatedly", "tardily", and "surcharge"...) in the OOTB KA Search Dictionary would be triggered to evaluate and find the most useful/relevant results.  Hence, end-user may simply ask/type in natural language question which will be properly handled by KA Search and the search results accuracy/relevancy will not be impacted.