791250 - [tracker] Add way to be specific with the advanced search

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 738789

(support.mozilla.org :: Search, defect, P2)

Description

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

As a contributor I want the advanced search to return specific results when I use  specific search terms. Today, the results are too general to narrow down my search. In particular:

* When I search for "Firefox Home" I don't want to see articles about the home page. 

* When I search for Firefox crashes on Facebook, I want to see threads that have Firefox crashing on Facebook, not all articles about crashes, and all articles about Facebook.

Comment 1

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

Pretty sure the first would be solved nicely by adding text_phrase queries to the search. That's something that would benefit normal searches, too. It'd increase the scores for documents where the words show up in the document in the same vicinity in the same order as a phrase. That's probably a half-day to implement.

The second is more complicated and probably requires either us implementing our own parser or supporting query_string query. We could either make Advanced Search always use query_string queries (in which case, it's got a very specific syntax for searching so entering in search criteria is different) or we could make it optional via a checkbox. In either case, it's probably a couple of days to implement.

Depending on the distance between "Firefox" and "Facebook", the second one might also be helped significantly by adding text_phrase queries.


I think I'd do this in two passes:

1. pass 1: add text_phrase queries for all searches (advanced and normal) in addition to the existing text queries and see if that's good enough

2. if not, pass 2: look at implementing some kind of query_string search


Relatedly, I'm pretty sure Matt wants a query_string syntax way of doing searches, but I don't think there's a bug for it, so I'm not sure if that's true or not.

Comment 2

[Matt Grimes [:Matt_G]]

Hey Will. I think your instincts are spot on. Let's try adding text_phrase queries first and then see how things go. If we need to iterate from there, we can.

Comment 3

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Thanks, Will! Let's do the first pass then. Also, can you point me to documentation about query_string queries?

Comment 4

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

Pretty sure we've talked about query_string queries before. The ES docs are here:

    http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/query-dsl/query-string-query.html

The syntax for query string queries is sort of documented here:

    http://lucene.apache.org/core/3_6_1/queryparsersyntax.html

It's definitely more powerful, but we'd want to add a help page for the syntax and if there are parse errors, then it'll throw an exception and no search results. Clearly not something we want to use for normal search, but for Advanced Search the pros probably outweigh the cons.

Comment 5

[Matt Grimes [:Matt_G]]

Hey Will. Yeah, that looks awesome. I agree that it should probably be an advanced search thing only. It also looks like exactly what we'd need to build the logic for best bets and tailored searches once we get to that point. Not sure if it would be reusable in any beneficial way, but that is exactly what we're looking for.

Comment 6

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

I created bug #793231 to cover adding text_phrase queries to the search.

I figured we should make this bug a tracker bug covering all the bugs that we create for specific work units towards fixing this one.

Comment 7

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

We just pushed the text_phrase query changes in bug #793231 to production on September 25th, 2012 at 10:30 AM EDT.

We should keep an eye on CTR to see if it goes up/down. Results for multi-word queries look a little better, but not immensely so and we still have synonym issues which affects phrase matching if the user uses different words than those in the corpus.

I think this change makes the advanced search a little better, but probably doesn't solve the problems in this bug.

We should think about the query_string option. I spun off bug #794083 to talk about and implement that.

Comment 8

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

2012Q4 is in the past. Moving on to the future!

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does this include ability to search only the topic title??

Ability to search topic title only is important to me, because I work on crash issues, and I want to find questions about crashes, but *not* find questions that merely have "crash" in the body because user kindly submitted the troubleshooting info.  (which always has "Crash Reports...")

Comment 10

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

It definitely can include that. This is just a tracker bug at this point. The details need to be fleshed out.

Comment 11

[Joni Chan]

Marking this as a duplicate since the other bug covers this for all of search, not just advanced search.