Phrase searching in the forum

[For Science!]

So now that the forum searching is back up, I thought I'd ask if this was always expected behaviour or if I am doing it wrong. I find that you cannot search for phrases in the in the search function as it always seems to break my query into single words.

 

For example, if I want to search for when people end their sentences with "what not" or "and what not", no matter what permutation I try to combine quotation marks, OR, AND, the search always throws back as if I just searched with "what"

 

"and what not"

'what not'

 

what not (no quotations)

"what not"

 

[LogicalDrm]

I'm pretty sure it has worked at some point. Now I'm getting same result as you.

[For Science!]

5 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

I'm pretty sure it has worked at some point. Now I'm getting same result as you.

I'm beginning to think it might just be this particular search term, the phrase "check my sig"  vs check my sig seems to work within my expectations (although it still somehow hits on singular "my" for some reason).  However I guess it is fair to expect there not to be "bad search queries" for this kind of platform. I suspect it has to do with the fact that AND and NOT may be reserved words?

[colonel_mortis]

I expect that the issue here is that very common words (it looks like "and" and "not" here) are removed from the search term to reduce the noise in the result. I agree that it isn't ideal when you're looking for exact phrases that include these stopwords, but turning it off would make other searches much less useful (imagine if searching for "intel or amd" returned results containing "or" weighted the same as those containing "intel" or "amd").

[For Science!]

5 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

I expect that the issue here is that very common words (it looks like "and" and "not" here) are removed from the search term to reduce the noise in the result. I agree that it isn't ideal when you're looking for exact phrases that include these stopwords, but turning it off would make other searches much less useful (imagine if searching for "intel or amd" returned results containing "or" weighted the same as those containing "intel" or "amd").

I was under the impression that if under quotations it would be fair to expect a exact match to the phrase, and that for those wanting to search posts containing intel or amd they would use all capitals as in the instructions i.e. intel OR amd (no quotations).

 

In summary:

"intel or amd" - exact match for the phrase "intel or amd" (no matching for intel, or, amd, as independent occurance)

intel OR amd - match for either intel or amd (i.e. no match for the term "or" as it is in all caps)

intel or amd - match for "intel" "or" "amd"

 

I think with the exception of NAND there aren't many terms that people fly about using all caps otherwise (OR, AND, NOR, NAND, XOR, XAND)

[colonel_mortis]

Just now, For Science! said:

I was under the impression that if under quotations it would be fair to expect a exact match to the phrase, and that for those wanting to search posts containing intel or amd they would use all capitals as in the instructions i.e. intel OR amd (no quotations).

 

In summary:

"intel or amd" - exact match for the phrase "intel or amd" (no matching for intel, or, amd, as independent occurance)

intel OR amd - match for either intel or amd (i.e. no match for the term "or" as it is in all caps)

intel or amd - match for "intel" "or" "amd"

 

I think with the exception of NAND there aren't many terms that people fly about using all caps otherwise (OR, AND, NOR, NAND, XOR, XAND)

Yeah, I agree that in phrase search it would make sense for stopwords literally too. However, the way that the index is constructed, the stopwords aren't actually stored in a searchable way at all, so it has no way of finding "or". In that example, it is actually fine, because in the search the stopword in the query is essentially replaced by some form of wildcard as far as I can tell, so you get "intel and amd", "intel or amd", "intel vs amd", etc. It breaks down in your case because there's a stopword ("and") at the start, which must be discarded (it can't be wildcarded at the start), so it effectively just searches "what *".

[For Science!]

10 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

-

I see, still admittedly a bit unsatisfied of the situation, but I guess I can always use google instead. Just felt there should be a way to do this within the site....

 

[colonel_mortis]

2 hours ago, For Science! said:

I see, still admittedly a bit unsatisfied of the situation, but I guess I can always use google instead. Just felt there should be a way to do this within the site....

 

I understand your frustration, but we are limited by the technology available. It should be pretty rare to want to do a phrase search made mostly of stopwords, and other searches should work (and should hopefully find what you're looking for because the search engine that we're using is much better than the previous ones we have used).