# Search problem (quotation marks)



## SleepingLeopard

I'm suddenly having a problem that's never occurred before. If I search words without quotation marks around them, everything works fine, but if I try to put quotation marks around the words to find the exact phrase, I'm told that it's under the minimum word length (1), no matter how long the words are.

For example, searching *go there*, the search proceeds as normal and finds all posts containing both *go *and *there*.

But if I try to search *"go there"* to find the two words together, I get the minimum word length error message.

Is anyone else having this problem?

Thank you

P.S. To be clear, this happens while searching the forums, not the dictionary.


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## jann

Hello Sleeping Leopard, 

Thanks for pointing out this problem.  It is doubtless related to the most recent server update, and we'll get it taken care of as soon as we can.

Jann
Moderator


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## mkellogg

It is going to take a while to get this one fixed - hopefully, sometime next week.


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## SleepingLeopard

Thank you very much Mike. We all appreciate all of the hard work you do for us!


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## Nunty

Not to dwell on a point, but I was just trying to find a post I beieve exists and got the following error message:


> The search term you specified ("word*reference*history") is under the minimum word length (1) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer. If this term contains a wildcard, please make this term more specific.


I know you're working on it; thought another example might help. In this particular case, searching without quotes gives far too many irrelevant results.


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## Outsider

I had the same problem with the search function yesterday.


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## mkellogg

Nun-Translator said:


> I know you're working on it;


Hi NT 
I wish I were working on  it.  I would have it fixed by now.  Right now I am just _waiting _for somebody else who has promised a fix for all 3.7.0 related searches.


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## Nunty

AAAARGH...

_He also serves who stands and waits_ or words to that effect. Let's all wait real hard and maybe that'll help.


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## SleepingLeopard

Here's an update (so I assume something was done).

I no longer get the minimum word length error message when searching with quotation marks, but now the search doesn't acknowledge the quotation marks.

Example: If I search "go there", I get all the threads with both of those words, but not necessarily together as a phrase.

I know it's being worked on, but I just wanted to let you know what's happened so far.

Thank you


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## mkellogg

Arrgh.  I thought that last night's changes fixed the term-in-quotes problem, but I see you are right.  Let me investigate more.

EDIT: I think I've got it fixed now.


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## SleepingLeopard

It's working perfectly! Thank you so much Mike!


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## Wilma_Sweden

SleepingLeopard said:


> It's working perfectly! Thank you so much Mike!


I can't get the string search to function properly. When searching for "It's working perfectly!" I should have hits containing this exact string only, but I get hits containing just It's OR working OR perfectly. That is, in my humble opinion, completely useless! Surely there must be a way of searching for an exact string of characters and get matching hits for that full string only, and not hits for partial matches? This search problem has been bugging me for some time, but I have been unable to find any clues elsewhere in the forums.

/Wilma


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## Cagey

What are you searching?

If I search for "_coming home_" with the language set to _English definition_, I get thread titles with that combination of words in that order.

If I search for "_it's working perfectly_" I get nothing for WR.  Apparently there is no thread containing that string.


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## Wilma_Sweden

Cagey said:


> If I search for "_it's working perfectly_" I get nothing for WR.  Apparently there is no thread containing that string.


Oh, but there *is*!!! See post #11 above in this very thread - it contains that exact string, which is why I chose it as an example. I expected such a *forum search* to return posts containing that exact string and no partial strings, i.e. you should have got at least one! Simple or advanced search makes no difference, you get the same depressing results.

Being able to search for strings is useful in many situations: let's say you remember someone saying something excellent, but you can't remember what thread it was in, nor can you remember exactly what the thread was about. In such cases it would be extremely useful to search for a string you do remember, such as "It's working perfectly". It goes without saying that you don't want all the gazillion posts containing just "It's"! 

From a moderator point-of-view (unless you have hidden tools that I'm not aware of), you could search for "http://www.youtube.com/" and very efficiently catch all those posts containing the forbidden YouTube links. What happens now is that you get a heap of posts containing "http://" or "Youtube" which is abso-**-lutely useless!

I've been a member of several other forums, and this is the first one I've come across where exact search strings don't work.

/Wilma


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## Cagey

I'm sorry.  I misunderstood what you were searching for.  I was only checking titles.

I have just put "It's working perfectly" into the "key word" section of "Advanced Search" and found the three posts in this thread that contain the string.  (There will be four now.)  

Sometimes I can't find a post or thread immediately after it has been posted, but I can later.  I believe it takes the system a while to catalog it.  I think there is a thread on this somewhere.

I also just tried the search you suggested for "http://www.youtube.com/" and got pages with results containing that link.  As far as I can see, none of them contained fragments of the string.


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## pyan

Today I searched inside posts for the word "choad".  A search of French English threw up a few threads, none of which contained the word.  Later a search of all the forums threw up more threads, including a new French-English vocabulary one which did contain the word.  (You can spot that one easily - the title is "choad" .)  I checked a couple of threads from other forums but did not see the word.

No, Wilma_Sweden, moderators don't have any extra search tools. 

I'll post some links from the search result below.

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=916336&highlight=choad  From FR-ES

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=655714&highlight=choad  From Old GV


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## Wilma_Sweden

Cagey said:


> Sometimes I can't find a post or thread immediately after it has been posted, but I can later.  I believe it takes the system a while to catalog it.  I think there is a thread on this somewhere.
> 
> I also just tried the search you suggested for "http://www.youtube.com/" and got pages with results containing that link.  As far as I can see, none of them contained fragments of the string.


I tried the same search in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.0.10 and the results are now the same in both cases. In one case I got a post that previously contained a YouTube link, which was deleted by a mod yesterday:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=7052264&highlight=http+www+youtube+com#post7052264

Either the link is still in the post, but hidden, or else there is a huge time delay (almost 20 hours), perhaps that's the problem you mentioned above, i.e. a delay in indexing new posts.

What may have confused me is the way the search terms are highlighted: only _http_ gets highlighted in the matching strings, not the whole string, and _http_ gets highlighted also in non-matching strings:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1365204&highlight=http+www+youtube+com

The same thing applies to phrase searches: I do get the posts with the matching string fully highlighted, but the separate words are also highlighted in other contexts, i.e. every _It's_ in the thread is highlighted regardless of what comes after it. I would have expected the highlighting to be applied only to the exact string searched for...
Example: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=272725&highlight=it+s+working+perfectly

If this is a result of the forum software or the way the search interface is programmed, I don't know. I just feel it would have been more useful to have the search result highlight the exact string only, rather than the separate keywords contained within that string. Maybe I'm being petty or pedantic, or asking too much, but now that I've worked out what's happening, at least I won't get too confused in the future.

/Wilma


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## Cagey

When I search by post, I get only the posts that have the desired phrase.  

I see how distracting it is to look at a thread where fragments were highlighted throughout.  I usually begin by eliminating the highlighting, because I don't like it. I have never thought it out, but probably the reason I don't like highlighting is the distraction of seeing all the irrelevant fragments of the string.


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## mkellogg

Thanks for the feedback.  i'll come back to this thread when I take a look at forum search again  (hopefully soon).

Mike


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## Wilma_Sweden

mkellogg said:


> Thanks for the feedback.  i'll come back to this thread when I take a look at forum search again  (hopefully soon).
> 
> Mike


Great!  
/Wilma


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## mkellogg

pyan said:


> Today I searched inside posts for the word "choad".  A search of French English threw up a few threads, none of which contained the word.  Later a search of all the forums threw up more threads, including a new French-English vocabulary one which did contain the word.  (You can spot that one easily - the title is "choad" .)  I checked a couple of threads from other forums but did not see the word.


I think I've just fixed that problem.  Seems that the search engine uses a random number to identify a word in its index.  That works well when the number of possible words is limited to a single language, but here we have many languages.  Changing that random number from a 32-bit number to a 64-bit number seems to have fixed the problem.


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## Cagey

SleepingLeopard said:


> ...now the search doesn't acknowledge the quotation marks.
> 
> Example: If I search "go there", I get all the threads with both of those words, but not necessarily together as a phrase.


This is still true if I search for a phrase with the search set to English Definition.  

If I search for "way to go", I get all threads with those three words in the title, in any order.  

If I add hyphens and search for way-to-go with or without quotation marks, I get only threads that have those words in that order.

This is true whether I start my search in the search box at the top of the forum page, or on the definition page itself. 

The Advanced Search that you get to through Search 
	
 in the bar at the top of the page seems to do the opposite.  It will search for a phrase enclosed in quotation marks, but it ignores hyphens.


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## mkellogg

Cagey said:


> If I search for "way to go", I get all threads with those three words in the title, in any order.


Thanks for pointing this out!  It was a mistake.   I just fixed it.

Mike


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