Search improvements

[zuketo]

Improvements to the search experience within our documentation.

[Leaf-Lin]

For example, when searching for ecctl, I am expecting to see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecctl/current/index.html or some of the children pages, but instead I see:

[nrichers]

A bit of storytelling around a better search experience: Content as Search - GAH Presentation.

When the time comes to work on this, I can also spend a bit of time documenting what I know about curating search results with our current implementation, which might be a first good step.

[debadair]

I know it's a big undertaking, but every minor release underscores how important fixing our doc search is. We're nearly a week out from 7.7, and the 7.7 docs are not fully indexed. It's a really poor user experience if folks are excited about a big release, and search and can't find the new stuff in the docs. We do all this work to promote releases, and then when we get a "live one", we basically throw cold water on them.

[Leaf-Lin]

Also related, how do we prevent showing up 404 pages?
For example, this search license + Elastic cloud gives the following results, yet when user click on the first hit https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-faq.html, they get 404:

[gtback]

Thanks, @Leaf-Lin . Our general approach to avoiding 404's is to ensure we set up redirects. In this case, it looks like the Cloud FAQ may have been split into several pages:

• https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-faq-getting-started.html
• https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-faq-billing.html
• https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-faq-technical.html

I'm not sure if it would be worth adding a "manual redirect page" like we've done in some places in the Elasticsearch docs. cc @elastic/cloud-writers

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More broadly, we know we need to improve the existing search, which is based on a crawler which we know is slow and prone to problems like this.