532836 - let user know if the search keyword is not indexed when "No messages match your search"

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[dynamis (Tomoya ASAI)]

When user search with keyword which is never indexed, currently search result tab will be shown with just "No messages match your search".
User will not informed his keyword is never indexed and cannot search even the messages includes the keyword.

For example, if we search with "Firefox 3.6", we'll get no messages.
This is because "." is delimiter of current porter tokenizer and 1 digit number "3" and "6" are not indexed.

Thunderbird should show error message like "you cannot search with keyword: 3.6", or user cannot understand why they cannot find their messages.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

"No messages match your search" might need to be improved

Comment 2

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> "No messages match your search" might need to be improved

That was your wording! j/k :)

rebron/standard8: I feel like we might want to relnote this, I know it's a bit late for that :)

In general I can see trying to do something better with a search term that includes a delimiter.  This should likely be lumped into the search hints group of improvements.  Search hints being the google style: "did you mean to search for $x?" - not that we'd use that text for this problem.

Comment 3

[Brian Hauer]

I have seen this message when I attempt to search using a phrase that includes what I expect are stop-words such as "a".  I have to remember to remove these short words from my query.

I am curious if it would be easy to pass the user-provided search terms through the same filter that removes stop-words and delimiters at indexing time for messages?  That is, drop the "a" from my search phrase automatically.  Perhaps then indicate in the results panel that the term "a" was not included in the search criteria.