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cacroll
Eventually, Prozac becomes normal
Premium Member
join:2002-07-25
Martinez, CA

cacroll

Premium Member

Search Restrictions Suck

I search on "one with everything".
one and with are very common words. To maximise search speed they were ignored.
Warning: more than 5000 candidate posts, capped at 5000

No results.
What use is it to search, if you restrict what I search?

dandelion
MVM
join:2003-04-29
Germantown, TN

dandelion

MVM

I find the search not to helpful either unless searching forum by forum. The site as a whole is best to be searched by a search engine. The restrictions are irritation and I always wish to put " " around them so they will keep the exact words. Perhaps if that could be added (or has it and I didn't know) ?

justin
..needs sleep
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I found your post by searching "one with everything" so it isn't that bad.

However unless you narrow the focus eg to a forum, or by adding more keywords, it is quite intensive to retrieve a 100k+ posts to full text scan each of them for a string.

cacroll
Eventually, Prozac becomes normal
Premium Member
join:2002-07-25
Martinez, CA

cacroll

Premium Member

I did search one forum. You know which one.
cacroll

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I've always found quotes ignored too.

justin
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No I don't know, is this a quiz that I'm scoring zero on?

if you can give a specific example where quotes are ignored please paste them I'm quite happy to find and fix search problems if they are described in a test case.
justin

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»/nsear ··· s=%2C166

gives me quite a few results.
OZO
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Here is my search for "one with everything":


It's from:
• with all of the words = "one with everything"
• paginate results = 200
• Search 2009+
The rest options are default.

justin
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Click for full size
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there are three quarters of a million posts with the word "everything" in them, and that word is indexed but having to fulltext search each and every one for a three word phrase is slow.

Of all 15k posts in 2013 with the word "everything", none have the phrase "one with everything" except for these ones and one from the U-verse forum.

However searching with another keyword you can find matches over all time, see screen shots.
justin

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And if there are examples of search breakage while including at least one word that isn't going to be in 100s of thousands of posts, please post so I can dig into it.
OZO
Premium Member
join:2003-01-17

OZO

Premium Member

I guess search results differ depending on where you make the search. In my case I did it from "Advanced search" page. If I do it from "Search" box in upper right corner, I see similar results as you do.

Today I repeated the same search from "Advanced search" page and got a little different result:


Problem - I did not search for parts of words... See how one of the results found "a coney vendor" (where "one" is part of the middle word). And second result contains " from within." ... " with "with" in the middle of the last word.

Additionally, why search engine doesn't respect quote marks? Quite often I want to find an exact phrase. In this case (with e.g. Google and others) I use " as indicator for such requests. If I can't use quote marks here, how I can make search request for exact phrase?

justin
..needs sleep
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join:1999-05-28
2031
Billion BiPAC 7800N
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justin

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the yellow highlighting is convenience only, the posts if you look at them actually do have the full search string as you entered it between the quotes (ignoring case) and they must be whole words.

So yes it does respect quote marks and especially if you include at least one word that isn't found all over the place, the "capped at.." message will not appear, and the results are exact.
OZO
Premium Member
join:2003-01-17

OZO

Premium Member

said by justin:

yes it does respect quote marks

Thank you, justin See Profile. I'll keep my eyes on it and will report back, if I find a problem with "exact phrase" search...