Advanced search not working?

[kgroneman]

I'm just wondering if others see the same thing I do.  

If I go to the community search page  (/t5/forums/searchpage) and click on ADVANCED it says: "Use quotes to search for an "exact phrase".   As far as I can tell it doesn't work.  Using quotes makes no difference in our forum search.   I'm just wondering if it's a UI issue or a basic functionality issue.  Can anyone verify?   Thanks.

[lilim]

In my community, exact phrase searches only work when using the advanced search field but not when using quotation marks.  This is in 18.12 but the search feature hasn't been upgraded yet.

I feel like I've been told that this is expected though, but I can't track down the ticket/topic. Maybe someone from Lithium can confirm.

[kgroneman]

I can't even get it to work in the advanced search field with or without quotes so you're doing better than I am.

[JuergenM]

We currently have a quiet clean stage on 18.12, not so much content on it. My findings:

"exact phrase" gives search result with the exact phrase in it. If exact or phrase appear alone, they are highlighted as well. There is no search result without the "exact phase"

Searching exact phrase (same search without ") gives search results where only one of the words has been found.

To proove this, I searched for "non exisiting exact phrase" and the search result for the search term with " was empty and the search without " yielded results.

I haven't checked if there are settings to influence how exact search results should be.

[kgroneman]

I looked for a pairing of words in our community that was unusual, but the words individually were not.    I had one specific post in mind that had that adjacent pairing.   I then went to the advanced search page and did two searches, one with quotation marks and one without using that pairing of words.  In both cases the post I wanted to see was not on the first page of results, but the top results were posts that had both words, just not next to each other.   The quotation marks made no difference.    I tried this with multiple pairings and phrases with the same results.   

[Tim_Dickinson]

Yeah, many of our new users have just discovered much the same thing: searching in quotes, whether in regular or advanced, seems to return fewer results (results with all the words, I think) than searching without quotes (results with any of the words) but it certainly doesn't only return results with the exact string, which is what everyone expects. I'm on the latest Search version. Very annoying.

[Tim_Dickinson]

Because the Advanced Search interface clearly says using quotes does an exact phrase search, and it clearly doesn't behave that way, I've raised a support case. We'll see what happens!

[kgroneman]

@Tim_Dickinson let us know what they say.  - Kim

[MartyL]

Hello all,

I wanted to drop a quick line that this is being looked at by engineering and support. We understand the impact this is having and are committed to ensuring a quick resolution for this.

I will be more than happy to update this thread with any relevant information that becomes available to me.

[kgroneman]

Thanks @MartyL .  Looking forward to your findings.

[MartyL]

Hi all

Just wanted to circle back around on this. The issue has been identified and has been assigned to an upcoming release. The fix is assigned to v19.12 of Community. 

[kgroneman]

@MartyL  Apparently it's not going to be in 19.12.  I was informed by the PM that: 

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Exact Phrase search is not part of 19.12 release.

We do not support exact phrase search as of now. For example, if customer inputs "old service" as search string, the system will try to give exact match "old service" but will also give results as "old telephone service" or "old national service" or "old -service" or search results with just "old" or "service" in it. In other words, If there is no exact match, then also it provides other results. Thus, we do not have phrase search as of now.

However, it is there in the roadmap and we plan to work on it.

---

So, it looks like we need to find the text key and remove  "exact"  that so our members quit complaining that it's not working.   

[kgroneman]

FYI the text key I was looking for to change "exact phase" to "phrase" in the advanced search instructions is search.advancedThreadInstructions.text