Diagnosing a wrong answer

A wrong answer is traceable, and the citation under it is where you start. This is the procedure we use, and you can follow it yourself.

Step 1 — Open the cited article

Every answer links the articles it used. Open them and read what they say about the question that was asked.

Step 2 — Decide which of three things happened

The article is right and the answer misrepresents it. Rare, and ours to fix. Send us the question and the answer; the trace identifier that comes with every response is what lets us find the exact request in our logs.

The article is wrong, out of date, or contradicts another article. The answer faithfully reproduced bad input. Fix the article, and every future answer is correct. This is the most common case by a wide margin.

The wrong article was cited. Retrieval found something plausible but not the best source, usually because two articles cover overlapping ground and the weaker one is worded more like the question. Send it to us — this is a retrieval problem and it is ours.

Step 3 — Fix the input, not the output

There is no way to override an individual answer, and that is deliberate. A list of hand-written exceptions would drift out of step with your documentation and quietly become a second, contradictory source of truth. The supported fix is to correct the article.

Once your documentation is corrected, tell us so we can re-index. Until then the old wording is what gets answered from. See Keeping your documentation up to date.

Step 4 — Check whether it is really one answer

Before treating a bad answer as a one-off, search your own documentation for the same topic. A single wrong answer often turns out to be two articles disagreeing, which will also be producing wrong answers for every neighbouring question.

What to include when you report one to us

The question as the customer typed it, the answer, and the trace identifier if you have it. With those three we can reproduce the exact retrieval. Without the question wording we usually cannot, because a small change in phrasing can change which article ranks first.