Wish list: Site Search

Hello, Bruno. Flash started this thread asking for a feature in the hopefully upcoming, Elements. He wants an easy way to implement full-site search. I agree that it would be very useful to have that either built-in or as a plug-in of what architecture Elements will support for third-party implementation.

I had to muck things up and bring GenAI into the conversation. (Sorry, Flash). I’ve had some success creating custom GPTs that do full website search of specific domains and suggested that it would be better for a GenAI-based search component for full website search. My arguments were natural language processing (and multiple languages at that!) and getting answer rather than just links to website pages only.

I have not yet made a chatbot widget to add to a website (living on the website as opposed to being a stand-alone custom GPT). I have, however, recently created a website living chatbot for a law firm that walks potential clients through a legal intake and gather information the lawyers need to help them get a prospective client’s on an issue. This is usually done by a live paralegal over the phone or in person. It takes up the paralegal’s time and doesn’t do any better than the chatbot for most interactions.

Anyway, I know that we can build chatbots to do full website search, but I’m hoping that Realmac will add a component into Elements that will make it much easier.

If you want help with a specific method of creating the bot for a website or writing the prompt(s) to prime a GPT to do your website search, let me know. I imagine we’ll need to take that chat offline from this forum or at least to another topic, but probably the former.

Don’t apologize. That is what the forum is for – sharing and developing ideas.

I’m not against AI or the concept of the solution. I truly see its potential. I just don’t want to babysit the implementation. Each time the LLM’s get updated the results are different for the exact same query. This remains AI’s greatest strength and weakness when it comes to using it as a site search tool.

I completely agree with you about having to babysit and keep the implementation up-to-date! However, depending not he use case and the owner of the website, I would argue that could be a feature not a bug!

If the very smart search/answer tool provides value to the website owner’s customers and achieves more of whatever goal they assigned to the website, then paying a maintenance fee (potentially higher than normal) would be a possibility that makes sense for the website owner and the Rapidweaver/Elements developer!

P.S. The apology was more so that the RM team doesn’t decide to kick me off for taking up too much of their bandwidth to put up with me! :wink: