315501 - Simple search form doesn't match parts of the word

Status: REOPENED

(Bugzilla :: Query/Bug List, defect)

Description

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

Steps to reproduce:
1) Open URL
2) type "report"
3) Press enter.

4) http://bugs.flock.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1544 - title "Flock performance reports".

It should show bugs that have search term in title.

If you search for the same word from the search form on the main page, it'll work without a problem.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

"Find a Specific Bug" contains only one field, which is used for both the title and comments of the bug. This information is given at the top of the page:

"Find a specific bug by entering words that describe it. Bugzilla will search bug descriptions and comments for those words and return a list of matching bugs sorted by relevance."

"relevance" means that results will be pondering to give more relevant first.

It's not a bug, but is so by design. If you want an "expert/advanced" search to get bugs where the word is specifically in the summary, use the "Advanced Search" page.

Comment 2

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> It's not a bug, but is so by design. If you want an "expert/advanced" search to
> get bugs where the word is specifically in the summary, use the "Advanced
> Search" page.

This is not a solution, and I still see it as a bug. It really doesn't matter if it's like that because of some mistake or by design. User doesn't think about complex relations and sublte differences between search forms.
User needs to check if there is a bug about his problem. Otherwise, he'll report one more dupe, or leave the system and we won't get his bug.
And when user is typing a "word that describe the bug" he really don't know if bug author filed it using "searchbox", "search box", "searchboxes", "searchboxing" or any other variation. He want to be able to type "search" and find everything that is anyhow similar, and/or if the result list is too long, he'll click "back" and add "box" as the second.
You can provide such strict features in advanced form, used by adv users who knows what they're doing, but this simple one was prepared for people who just need to use bugzilla but don't want to do that. So the pain of using it should be minimized and amount of work/thinking required to make their work too.
If it's like that by design that Imho the design is bad.

I'm CC'ing justdave and myk because I FWIK they're responsible for UI.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Based on his comment, I think LpSolit may have misunderstood the problem being reported.  The problem isn't that the search is matching bugs it shouldn't be, the problem is that the search isn't matching bugs that it should.

As I mentioned on IRC, I think this is because it's using MySQL's fulltext search, which is probably only indexing full words, and not partial words.  On the other hand, I *did* think that MySQL's fulltext indexes indexed word roots as well...  which should have dealt with Gandalf's example...

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

You can search for roots by appending an asterisk to the word, i.e. "report*".  But we should probably make it possible for "report" to match "reports" without making the user learn how to use the asterisk.

Comment 5

[u597032]

Page no longer active

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I can still reproduce this. The site with the original test case is gone, but you can perform the same searches on bugzilla.mozilla.org and get the same results described above.

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

That said, I'm not sure what to do about it... comment 4 still stands. If anyone's got UI/UX ideas for this, feel free to share. :)