Problem with forum search using 'AND'?

TFormoso · Post by **TFormoso** » Mon Nov 17, 2003 8:21 pm

I wanted to search for all posts containing all of the keywords 'signal' 'light' and 'out'.

I tried searching by putting signal light out in the keyword box and click the option that said all terms, but I get loads of matches for posts which only contain one or two of those words.

I tried instead putting signal AND light AND out and chose the other option of query as entered, but I got the same result.

Finally I tried putting AND signal AND light AND out and chose the other option of query as entered, with the same result.

It looks as though the AND does not work and all searches are using OR to join the search terms.

Have I misunderstood the search form?

Thanks

Tony

danielw2599 · Post by **danielw2599** » Thu Nov 20, 2003 2:36 pm

hi

When i do a search i normaly find what im looking for, but when i scroll down to change the page is comes up "no matches found in your criteria" even though theres hundreads of matches.

Whats this about?

thanks

Dan

JohnKendrick · Post by **JohnKendrick** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 8:50 pm

I would appreciate if that could be clarified too. (But didn't like to ask!!)

John

alan2 · Post by **alan2** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 10:16 pm

My exact search parameters ==

Code: Select all

signal AND light AND out

number of results == 132 ?

this is correct. within the topics they are used.

Search for Signal Light out == Search found 2025 matches

AND signal AND light AND out == 132

johndibben · Post by **johndibben** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 11:30 am

I find it best to simply type one word. It's far from precise, throws up much that you don't want but searching forums normally points you in in the right direction.

No offence to the site managers but I don't use it like I would Yahoo

TFormoso · Post by **TFormoso** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 11:40 am

Thanks Alan,

I thought that when I tried it, I got many more results than 132, but unfortunately I didn't make a note of the actual number of hits, but it is not important.

Even the 132 results are not correct.

1. On all the examples I looked at in the results list, only signal and light were highlighted. Perhaps this is a bug in the highlighting code? An example result page URL is http://forums.atomic-systems.com/viewto ... gnal+light

Perhaps the bug is in the URL generation rather than the highlighting process itself? If you add +out to the highlight list, the 'out' word gets highlighted also (if it is on the page). Maybe??

2. Looking at some random samples of the results, there are definitely pages where not all three of the terms are found.
e.g. The topics 'Signal Brightness', 'SVR - problem with activity' or 'Signal Phobia' do not contain 'out', but they appear in the results list. If you search the pages of these topics for 'out' with IE then the only 'out' found is either in the page headings 'Logout' or 'Route Building', or in the user descriptions 'Location: Out in the lanes in the Scoobydoooo ! Mehawwwh!!!' These clearly shouldn't be the reason for the hits.

Perhaps the Search function only searches on 2 terms?

3. Finally, and most exasperatingly, a search for the single term 'out' produces exactly 0 hits! Perhaps the Search function contains a list of non searchable words? e.g. 'the', 'in', 'up, 'down', 'around', 'near', 'use', 'so', 'over', 'under', 'me' 'you', 'your', 'here', 'there' (None of these find any hits, but there are clearly topics/posts containing these words)

Perhaps there is a 'keyword list', and only the words in that list are searchable? It would be useful to know.

Putting all this together, I think the answer is something like :-

The Search function does

allow more than 2 terms to be entered and searched
restrict the search to keywords that it does not have on some exclusion list
silently ignore the unwanted keywords when searching and highlighting

e.g. 'boy and girl and dog' correctly returns a result containing all three words, all highlighted.

Tony