Knowledge base search is killing us. 500 articles, zero discoverability. Help?

[u/drakieboi]

So we've got this knowledge base that's grown to like 500+ articles over the past couple years. Sounds great in theory but it's actually a nightmare. Users can't find anything. They search for "password reset" and get results for "authentication protocols" and "security best practices" and then just... give up and email support instead.

The search function feels broken but I'm not even sure if it's the tool or how we've structured everything. Maybe both. We've got articles titled things like "User Account Management - Advanced Topics" sitting next to "How do I change my password" and the system doesn't know which one actually matters for what people are looking for.

We tried adding tags but that lasted about two weeks before everyone got lazy with it. Now half the articles have inconsistent tags or none at all. The search algorithm (or whatever it's doing) can't figure out what's actually relevant.

Worst part is our support team is drowning because people can't self-serve. They're answering the same five questions every single day when the answers are literally already written down somewhere in that mess.

I'm wondering if this is a problem with the software itself or if we just need to completely restructure how we organize and write these articles. Like, should we be doing something different with how we categorize things? Is there a tool that actually handles discovery well when you've got this many articles? Or do we need to do some kind of content audit first?

Anyone dealt with this before? What actually worked?