Am I misunderstanding the New Search?

... not the Site Search but the Your Books search.

I understand about the stemming -- search 'fishing' and you get 'fish' too, even if it's not Friday.

But the Search Tips also tell me, under Simple Searching, that "art history" in quotes will return books that have that exact phrase "art history" somewhere in its entry. It doesn't say that the "quotes" search works only in non-stemmed fields.

Well, I searched "reviewer" in quotes to assemble the handful of My Books that have that exact word, but I got over 200 results because the search pulled 'review' and 'reviews' too. And when I search "conny" to find how many of my books have the word 'conny-catching' or 'conny catcher' somewhere in their entries, I also get all my books by Connie Willis.

This doesn't seem right. Shouldn't "quotes" trump stemming?

>1 Crypto-Willobie: It would be nice if it was possible to trump stemming, but alas the stemming is done when data is indexed for searching, so I don't think it is possible. The old search basically performed a raw string search, so it was possible to do a search for an exact phrase.

My workaround is to search in the exported data and then search for the corresponding book_id numbers, i.e.
123123123 OR 123123124 or 123123125
Alas the search string can't go beyond the first 12 or so book_id's but then I just redo the search after having fixed the errors (because that's typically what I look for. Half-finished reviews, covers I forgot to scan etc.)

No, quotes do not trump stemming.

>3 lorax: Well, that sucks.

>2 bnielsen: Thanks, but that workaround is not at all practical for me. Anyone have a different workaround? It seems pretty incredible that I am unable to search for a term that occurs five times in my catalogue without being given 200+ hits to wade through. This seems to me to be a pretty fundamental flaw in Catalogue Search. I might as well not bother.

Then I thought that if I searched "reviewer" on the site search (which does work unstemmed) and went down the left-hand column on the results page to click the Your Books link (which appears to be offered in the same way as Members, Talk, etc) that the "quotes" search might 'import' into Your Books. However when I click on Your Books there I get a mostly blank screen that appears to offer a search but in fact does absolutely nothing, even with a search term entered and clicking on the search icon. Whatever the intended functionality of this page is, it appears to be broken.

Unfortunately that's (not being able to override it, that is) is just how stemming works. If you're looking for "reviewer" in a particular field you can try specifying the field to narrow it down.

The author field shouldn't be stemmed, though, so if a search for "conny" is bringing up books by Connie Willis, that do not have her name in the tags or review or elsewhere, that's a bug and should be reported.

Mike is going to look into another technique of allowing a hard-line "exact phrase" search.

>6 timspalding:
Thanks!

That would be great. I really dislike the stemming.

>5 lorax:
The 'conny' is a title term; my Connie Willses are of course mostly author terms but I can't swear they don't also appear in the green-letter descriptions or some other field which may be subject to stemming.

As to "Reviewer", it's primarily a title term (a lit journal from the 1920s) but it should also pull from Comments (Reviewer staffers), Publication info (articles 'from the Reviewer') and the like, so I just want to be able to do a sweep search through all catalogue fields. And if titles (stemmed) won't quote-restrict, then searching alternative fields is no use. I can always just search review* and wade through...

9>

Restricting a search for "conny" to the Author field in your library doesn't turn up any results, so the all-fields search must be pulling that in from another, stemmed field. Restricting a search for "connie" to Title on the other hand does turn up your conny-catching books, confirming that the stemmer is matching those results.

My guess is that the summary field, which I know from a previous thread is separately indexed, is stemmed; searches for "conny" and "connie" restricted to that field turn up identical results. It probably shouldn't be.

I think i've been able to come up with a fix where phrase searches (ie surrounded by quotes) will not adhere to stemming logic. so "Running with scissors" wont return a book titled "runs with scissors". try it out and let me know if there are any issues.

Hope this works as I have been putting in the exact title of a book and getting tons of answers with the exact book often down at the bottom.

>12 mysterymax:

Let us know.

As for the location of the answer, we've decided that, with small libraries, it's better to retain the member's search settings (i.e., what you're sorting by) than to rerank items by relevancy.

>11 miketopper:

Yes! (pumps fist)
Fantastic! It's aliiiiiiive!
LT is already my favorite site, and this just improved it significantly.
Mil gracias! Diolch yn fawr!

It works as long as I put the quotes in. I still can't for the life of me figure out if I put -The Last Policeman- in the search (without the dashes) I would get back as the first book -The Brothers of 221B Baker St-. They don't have anything in common.

>15 mysterymax: you are probably doing an "all" or "most" fields search and its finding those words in a different field.

if you did a search over just the title, either by selecting it from the search dropdown or typing in:

title:The Last Policeman

it will only search on the title of the book

I no longer get a search drop down. I did for a short while and then it disappeared. I figured it had just been dropped.

>17 mysterymax:

What do you mean? You don't see the search menu here:

Sorry that I see, but it used to work that when I started typing a bunch of titles came up. Or at least I thought they did. Having to go to the drop down to get a title search seems a little redundant to me, but if that's what it takes, I will obey!!!

Added: tried using it and I actually like it because after I used the title/author and went on, that option stayed, so I wouldn't have to do it every time. Also tried it with tags and like it very much.

Thanks!

Ah. That's your browser filling stuff in, not us.

>15 mysterymax:

looks like its finding 'the brothers of bakers street' when you search your library for 'the last policeman' (no quotes) because its finding those 3 words in your review of the book. the all fields search will be searching your review.

Now I just have to remember how to do this. Somehow looking for books with Aging in the title and coming up with everything I own about the Middle Ages doesn't work for me.

>22 MarthaJeanne: Aging* on all fields returns 3 books in your catalog. Should there be more?

I was getting rid of the two in the theology collection today. No idea what else there is. With "Aging" I got what I wanted. Like I said, I got all sorts of weird stuff searching on aging or 'aging'. It just doesn't feel right to me, the way I get a lot of extra garbage when I have been careful to search on the word I want.