Discourse's search broken? It is returning 'similar'/'partial' matches rather than 'exact' matches

The search is returning dozens of matches rather than exact matches. It is also ignoring limit parameters placed in the Advanced Search.

e.g., there was an interesting Subreddit posting and I wanted to check if that username was already mentioned in postings on our forums.

So I searched for the very unique “PlantOfJazz” and it found dozens of matching threads. But none of those threads had matches for that term using the Browsers Find. Then I went into the Private Messages to do the same search. And it found the same results… that were Public threads, not messages.

I did the same search here in the Meta forum. Again it found dozens. (Some had postings with the word “Plant”. So it seems to be finding partial matches instead of exact matches.)

If there are very few matches, we expand search to include semantic AI results which is why you’re seeing partial matches on Meta.

Hmm yeah this doesn’t seem ideal, “in message” shouldn’t fill in public results

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That is probably a reasonable fallback behavior. But it should report the end of the few (or no) exact matches, and clearly indicating the beginning of semantic AI results.

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It kind of does that.

The really disappointing fact is that it should at least have found this topic as the first result. It’s not a PM but it does contain an exact match.

Another thing. I think “AI results” is a bit strange terminology. Something like “similar results” ?

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Odd. That does not happen on our site … nor did it happen in my test here. But of course, the results will no longer have a “no results” for the test case… once this thread works its way into the indexed content.

The “Discobot discoveries” is not something that appears to be active on the site.

Ahh. I see. (Although the Discobot search must be an addon that we don’t have installed?) It is in the search preview here. But the results AFTER pressing Enter do not indicate the division between exact and similar matches… nor simply that “no results” were found.

No. It is in there. But if you search “in:messages” then it switches to “AI” which does not find it. If you search in regular topics then it does find it… :roll_eyes:

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I am sorry to contradict but, No. It is not in our free (for open source projects) site hosting by the Discourse organization. I just re-tested in both the forums and the Private Messaging.

The screen capture I pasted above (that DID have it) was the re-test in the Meta forum.

I was (obviously) referring to this topic in this forum.

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Yes, we auto expand search when there are zero matches in the full page search, as said above.

What may be confusing everyone is that we started doing that for the header quick search, when there are less than 3 results for a search, but there we do not have any indicator that the extra results come from semantic search, as we’ve found it too small to add any indicators for that.

Our compromise was adding the ai-search-result to each result, so sites can optionally theme those differently or add any indicators they found necessary via our theming capabilities.

Our reasoning is that expand search automatically covers a lot of situations, like searching in another language (our semantic search is multilingual), typos, synonyms, etc

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In that case, the search would benefit from an Advanced Search option to not do that. There are times (many times) that you need an exact search in order to eliminate being flooded with false positives.

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