Forum and Author search behaviour

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djm
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Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:42 am
Location: N.Z.

Forum and Author search behaviour

Post by djm »

I am seeing puzzling behaviour for the forum search functionality and I am wondering whether anyone else is experiencing something similar.

Forum Search
(a) enter "job log" (without the quotes), select the "Search for all terms" option and invoke the search. I see no successful hits.
(b) enter "job log" (without the quotes), select the "Exact Match" option and invoke the search. I see results returned.

This behaviour is puzzling as I would have thought that option (a) would have been a looser constraint than (b) and hence, if anything, would have returned more hits rather than no hits.

Author Search
Click on my user name to see my profile and then click on "Find all posts by D". As a minimum I would have expected it to have returned this post but no posts are found.


Am I alone in this behaviour or do others see something similar. I notice a few posters stating they have searched the forum unsuccessfully and I'm wondering whether the search functionality is not returning results it should be.

David.
kcbland
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Post by kcbland »

Well, I know that too broad of a search overwhelms the indexes and returns nothing. You can imagine that the word "job" has about 10 million uses in over 69000 posts, so, it is a bad choice to use when doing an any-word match.

Try using the exact error message, or a specific term.
Kenneth Bland

Rank: Sempai
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chulett
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Post by chulett »

Check this post for some previous discussions on this issue.

David, I think your "Author Search" issue is simply because of your choice of a one letter user name. :wink:
-craig

"You can never have too many knives" -- Logan Nine Fingers
djm
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Posts: 68
Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:42 am
Location: N.Z.

Post by djm »

Thanks - I understand the behaviour now.

And the one character name was an accident (honest John). When I registered I got a bit ahead of myself and ended up with a single character (it was going to be djm) and of course now I'm stuck with it (and maybe the :wink: is genuinely a :!: )!

David.
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