1005123 - search for a word in quotes should not return variations on that word

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 738789

(support.mozilla.org :: Search, defect)

Description

[bugcon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140421221237

Steps to reproduce:

Searched https://support.mozilla.org/ using a search term in quotes.

E.g. https://support.mozilla.org/search?q=%22this+term+only%22


Actual results:

Search returned results with similar terms but not the exact term, with no option to search for just the quoted term.


Expected results:

Search should have returned only results that matched the quoted term or provided an option to do so.

Comment 1

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

When you say "term", are you referring to the phrase you have quoted (e.g. "this term only") or a single word in the phrase (e.g. "only")?

Comment 2

[bugcon]

The actual search term i was looking for was "featured":
https://support.mozilla.org/search?q="featured"
which returns results for "features" and "feature" rather than the quoted term, though i'd expect quotes to apply to multi-word searched too.

Comment 3

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Ok, those are two different issues. Quotes around multiple terms making it a phrase is covered in bug #738789.

Fixing the summary so this issue is clearer.

Comment 4

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

I agree that this is a desired thing, but it is also something I don't we could do without major changes to how we work with Elasticsearch. The particular feature that causes similar words to be treated equivalent in this case is called stemming. It identifies words that share a common root (or fakes it well enough to be no different). In the future we will also have real human-driven synonyms. We could turn off the similar words feature for an entire search, but I'm not sure if it is possible to do it on a word-by-word basis without a lot of work.

Comment 5

[bugcon]

(In reply to Mike Cooper [:mythmon] from comment #4)
> We could turn off the similar words feature for an entire search

This sounds like a solution, it's similar to what google do at the moment where if you enter a search term incorrectly it will provide search results for what it though you meant, but offer a link to search for the term as entered.

eg:
"Showing results for firefox
Search instead for fiirefox"