791200 - Switch to AND search in advanced search

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Currently we are doing an OR search on advanced search. So searching for "Firefox Home" will return all results with "Firefox" in them OR "Home" in them. What should happen:

If you search for Firefox Home: It should give you only articles with the strings Firefox AND Home in them

If you search for "Firefox Home": It should only give you articles where the string "Firefox Home" appears.

Comment 1

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

We've talked about this several times and I keep trying to emphasize that AND is the totally wrong thing to do--even for Advanced Search. Amongst other things, it creates the following problems:

1. if you misspell one of the words, NO search results will come up.

2. if one of the words you use is "wrong" in the sense that we use a different word in the corpus, then NO search results will come up.

3. for more than two words this gets increasingly problematic for finding what you're looking for if you don't already know exactly what you're looking for.


Since this bug is about implementing a solution that we really don't want to do, we should mark it as WONTFIX. If you still have a problem you want to solve, open a bug about the problem so we can talk about that and solutions that better fit the problem.

Comment 2

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

I'm reopening this, on the following account:

* Advanced search is not available to normal users, only contributors (logged-in users) can access it.
* Contributors need a powerful way to search existing threads, the current method doesn't allow for drilling down based on search terms. 
* Contributors can handle the "no results" case.
* Contributors use the search in cases where they already know what they are looking for.

Will, correct me if I'm wrong, but we'd still do stemming, no? So, searching for Firefox crashes would still bring up Firefox crashed. It does today, even if I search for crashing.

Comment 3

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

(In reply to Kadir Topal [:atopal] from comment #2)

We would like a proper bug that talks about a problem instead of a solution. Then we can talk about solutions. If you want to turn this bug into that, fine. But it is probably cleaner to start with a new one.

Comment 4

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Alright, filed a new bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791200

Comment 5

[Alice Wyman]

(In reply to Kadir Topal [:atopal] from comment #4)
> Alright, filed a new bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791200

What was the new bug you filed, Kadir?  That link is for THIS bug!

Comment 6

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

(In reply to Alice Wyman from comment #5)
> (In reply to Kadir Topal [:atopal] from comment #4)
> > Alright, filed a new bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791200
> 
> What was the new bug you filed, Kadir?  That link is for THIS bug!

should've been bug 791250