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Forum: Full-text search apparently broken

PostPosted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 3:34 am
by daydreamer
Hi,

first of all: we should really have a forum for board feedback issues instead of having these issues scattered all over the forums. (And yes they are: a quick skim-through brought up at least 4 forums with forum issues posted to them)

But now to the actual issue:

full-text search is definitely broken.
To prove this, I have a test case.

1. http://www.nwoutpost.com/forum/search.asp

2. Search for: "investigate" (without quotes)
3. Select "Search for all words"
4. Select Search Forum: "Next Wave"
5. Search In: Entire Message
6. Search By Date: Any Date
7. Search By Member: MikeP

Well, this is interesting. Because if you do everything as described, you will get one post as a result:

http://www.nwoutpost.com/forum/topic.as ... nvestigate

However, the above testcase should output all posts in "Next Wave" in which our trusty administrator said "investigate". (Dunno if there are some at all!)

"investigate" is mentioned in this thread by Spaz, not by MikeP, so the SQL string seems to have an issue because it does not correctly incorporate the username into the query...(or even not at all)

Thought I'd report this here so that more people get a grip why their full-text searches fail (nearly always)

PostPosted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 9:32 am
by MikeP
Thanks for the pointer Daydreamer. I modified the search form based on a simplified & improved mod that I found. I also cleaned up the search code so that it will allow for quotes when doing an exact phrase search (which I'm conditioned to doing myself).

It will still tend to fail or return no results when you search on "Any Date" or "All Forums" instead of narrowing it down. Ideally, a start and end date picker would even be better but that would be custom coding on my part.

Try it out again and let me know if this is any better/faster.