1516496 - Search on 'choices' comes up with 'choice', this should only happen with wildcard 'choice*' according to Gloda manual

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 752844

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0

Steps to reproduce:

I searched 'choices' in inbox search bar.


Actual results:

First 5 results were 'choice', tested top one to see if 'choices' was anywhere in email, it wasn't. 6th result was first one with requested term 'choices', which was the email I was looking for.


Expected results:

The 6th result should have been the top result, no results should have been presented for the unrequested term 'choice'. This is the expected result according to the Gloda manual at Global Search - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search. Gloda does have a wildcard character, so searching for 'choice*' should give results for 'choice', 'choices', 'choicest', etc. if I'd wanted to do that. If the wanted email had not been sent in the last few days it could not have been found using search since there are too many false positives. The top search results under 'relevance' were 'choice', I only found the email by going to 'date'. The current search tool is only effective for search words which do not contain other common words, or when the approximate date of the email is known. This is not a new bug, several years ago I tried to find a business expense searching for 'expenses', only to be swamped by emails with 'expense', 'expensive', etc.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search doesn't say is that indexing is stemmed. So the word choices you have listed are all indexed as "choice", and the results you see are by design.

What you are asking for is bug 752844