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By adding a Index, the user will be able to search for help by selecting from a list of keywords that you specify. An Index is a common component of help files, and most help files contain one. But lets think a bit more about indexing ...
To understand the importance of an index, it is helpful to have a look to the alternatives. When you are reading the following text, you should consider that I don't mean the excellent technique of Google or other newer search engines with that.
Microsoft released a new HelpViewer with Visual Studio 2010. Here is some interesting feedback on Microsoft Connect regarding the lack of an index:
Trying to get information by full-text search engines may give back hundreds of links to you. So you struggle through the list, trying to find a link with useful information.
A concordance of a book lists every word in the book and every place where the word appears. Full-text search is like using a virtual concordance but a concordance is not a index.
You can't see the list of words when using full-text search and the list is still limited to the words that appear in the HTML source. These disadvantages also apply to full-text search with HTMLHelp files (CHM) which represent only one of the search possibilities here, however.
If the word isn't in the HTML source, it isn't included in the search result. A user searching "metal" could not find your contents, when you are only using "platin", "gold" and "silver" as terms.
If the word is in the HTML source, every occurrence of the word is found or highlighted and it's hard to separate the best topics.
Keyword-based search engines are reading a special tag in each source file from the metadata section. This tag <meta> can specify synonyms and terms that don't appear in the body of the HTML file. So you can use this special tag to improve the users chances of finding the information they are looking for.
Searching for keywords is like using a limited virtual index. But the users are still shooting in the dark, because they can't see the list of keywords.
In online help for software programs, there is always a table of contents and an index. Software producers would never consider having ONLY a search engine available to find information within their help files. Instead, they know that users need to find relevant information right away, and that they will need better navigation cues than full-text searching can provide.
Why then are online help file indexes often of poor quality? In most cases, it's because the help author has computer generated the index. Which brings us to another point. How should the index be created?
In reality, computers cannot generate indexes, they can only generate concordances. That is, they can create a list of all the words found within a document. Again, we are faced with the same problem we had when discussing search engines.
Once more, we can look to how book indexes are created and see what we can learn from the publishing industry. Producing quality reference for technical documentation needs the use of human indexers. Professional indexers read through each line of contents and add terms to the index, even if the text does not use these exact words.
If you have a computer generated index, it's a good idea to add precise information by a human indexer to this virtual index. This work of course is rather expensive and is therefore better to find a mixture of the automatically generated index and the manual addition.
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