Adobe Community Help and Google Site Search: Making search come alive in CS5
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:03 PM
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Nichoson, Product Manager at Adobe Community Help.2
Back in 2008, Adobe began to use the power of Google Site Search to “plug the whole community brain trust right into the Creative Suite,” as we liked to say.
Now with the launch of Adobe® Creative Suite 5, we’ve taken that brain trust to a whole new level with the introduction of our new Community Help application. It’s an Adobe AIR®-based companion that’s automatically installed as part of any new Adobe CS5 product.
Launched directly from the Help menu of any CS5 product, the Community Help application enables customers to:
- find fast answers with powerful new search options that let them focus results to just Adobe content, community content, developer resources, or even code samples
- download core Adobe Help and language reference content for offline viewing (thanks to the Adobe AIR runtime)
- see what the community thinks is the best, most valuable content via ratings and comments
- share their expertise with others and find out what experts have to say about using their favorite Adobe product
Google Site Search: integration and innovation
Under the hood of the Community Help app lies our Google Site Search engine. This search engine searches across about 3000 sites – content such as product Help, language references, Tech Notes, Developer Connection articles, and Adobe TV videos as well as the best online content from the Adobe community. Content is chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and developer communities, meaning customers find the answers they need faster.
Thanks to the robust Google Site Search APIs, the development team was not only able to easily integrate search results but also create unique innovations such as our new Code Search functionality. Formerly known as Blueprint, this new search option allows Adobe Flash® and Flex developers to search for relevant code samples so that they can write better code, faster.
A new definition of Help
By combining the best community content with the definitive reference that customers traditionally expect from Adobe, Community Help allows us to expand the definition what help means. Now users can tap into an entire ecosystem of content — one that can dynamically adjust to changing user needs and provide a much richer set of resources over the lifetime of the product.
Community Help can also be used as a standalone application. To give it a try, you can download it from adobe.com.
Jerry Blogger by Jerry Shum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Hong Kong License.
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