User Experience Insights
Using Search Engines to find SAP Help Topics
Nowadays we are spoiled by the always improving search results search engines like Google, Bing or others provide us. Many times it’s enough to just enter only the first three letters of our question into the search box to get good suggestions and relevant hits.
However, sometimes the algorithm seems to be barking up the wrong tree, showing only misleading pages about totally different topics. In that case, you can narrow down your search to find what you are looking for.
As an example, I want to find out more about the favorite objects feature in ADT. So, I simply enter the following into the search box: adt favorite objects
The first couple of results are misleading: They point to a plugin for ADT called “ABAP Favorites”. The plugin seems quite popular, so the page rank is high. The other results on the first and even the second page don’t look relevant, either. So, what now?
Use quotes
This might be one of the oldest most widely known tricks for many search engines, but it is still very effective: Using quotes.
Searching for adt “favorite objects” gives me a SAP Help Portal topic about ABAP repository trees as the number one search result. It contains info and further links to favorite objects in ADT, just what I was looking for.
Exclude Terms From Your Search
If you want to exclude terms from the search result, type a minus “–“ before the search term. For example: “favorite packages” abap -workbench
The results will then display only hits which don’t contain your “non-word”.
Combine Your Search
To combine your search terms, you can use AND / OR. As an example: adt AND “ABAP Development Tools”
Use Search Operators
You can use search operators for further specifications. Operators are different depending on the search engine you are using. The most common ones are:
site:example_url.com – search only within a specific web site.
intitle:keyword – search for pages that contain your keyword in the page title.
inurl:keyword – search for pages that contain your keyword in the page url.
Search on SAP Help Portal
Maybe it’s just too obvious: You can also go to help.sap.com and search for a relevant help topic there. The SAP Help Portal has lots of helpful features to personalize your search, look at your search history and manage your favorite pages and products. For more information about the SAP Help Portal, see:
Customize Your SAP Help Portal Experience | SAP Blogs
Ready, Set, Go! SAP Help Portal Pages Are Here! | SAP Blogs
Related Blog Posts:
https://blogs.sap.com/2014/08/02/my-tips-to-use-google-advanced-search-to-find-more-abap-resource/
Another useful search operator is "after", e.g. if you want to exclude very old answers for outdated releases. Just add e.g. "after:2015" to find only newer sources.
Keep in mind that some dates in Q&A got messed up in 2016 SCN migration. I've been regularly seeing some posts that are dated 2019 in Google search but are actually from the 2000s. Blog dates should be fairly accurate though.
Thanks for sharing!
I've been using site:sap.com addition for many years already and the issue I'm seeing is that Google search + SAP Help is not always the winning combination.
Not sure if it's the problem with Google or SAP content or both. But typically you'd get full page of the links with the same or almost the same name and no idea which one of them is most recent or what it belongs to. Searching for ABAP-related stuff is particularly funky.
Tip of the day: do not even attempt searching for "ABAP keyword documentation" without "site:sap.com" addition. You get 2 outdated links followed by YT videos and junk from 3rd party websites.
Now this is a slightly better result but still like which one of these do I need? You have to look very closely at the path here and "latest" is not the top one.