# Search a term in Japanese
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [17 בספטמבר, 2018, 1:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359 "2018-09-17T13:58:22Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@SSS](https://meta.discourse.org/u/SSS)
#### Post date: [13 ביולי, 2020, 5:50am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/21 "2020-07-13T05:50:36Z")
Thank you for your reply.
1. A sample paragraph here in katakana
通報テスト9, 通報テスト11, 通報テスト8… etc.
2. A sample search term that you have that is not working
テスト
The “テスト” is not working.
3. Confirmation that your site locale is in Japanese or that `search tokenize chinese japanese korean` is enabled
Yes, I have confirmed that both settings are set correctly.
---
### Author:  [@SSS](https://meta.discourse.org/u/SSS)
#### Post date: [15 ביולי, 2020, 1:08am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/24 "2020-07-15T01:08:25Z")
An incredible thing happened. After changing the ‘min search term length’ from the default value of 2 to 1, we are now able to search for katakana. I don’t know why, but is this setting relevant?
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### Author:  [@tgxworld](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tgxworld)
#### Post date: [24 באוגוסט, 2020, 9:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/26 "2020-08-24T09:01:13Z")
I can repro this and it is mainly due to a combination of
>
and
>
The term `テスト` is converted to `テ ス ト` after going through `CppjiebaRb` and this trips the min\_search\_length protector we have.
@sam This is tricky to fix because we need a proper tokenizer for Japanese to resolve search issues like this for good. We can do tweaks here and there but it is going to be a game of wack a mole.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [28 בספטמבר, 2020, 7:14am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/27 "2020-09-28T07:14:51Z")
I don’t think there exists a proper Japanese segmentar we can use.
I think the best thing to do here is simply tone down these defaults to 1.
>
Otherwise we are banning people from searching for house in Japanese which seems reasonable (家) … we allow people to search for house in English.
---
### Author:  [@yashi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/yashi)
#### Post date: [2 בפברואר, 2022, 10:13am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/28 "2022-02-02T10:13:13Z")
I don’t use Ruby these days nor don’t know the requirement from Discourse but there seems to be a gem for “[mecab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeCab)”.
> **[mecab | RubyGems.org | your community gem host](https://rubygems.org/gems/mecab/)**
I came to this topic because I found that searching some words doesn’t work on [my hosted public instance](https://forum.spacecubics.com/). I have
- min search term length: 1
- search tokenize chinese japanese korean: enabled
- default locale: Japanese
IIRC, I’ve initialized the site with English locale and changed the setting to Japanese later.
The words I found failed to search are “北側”, “真上”, “一般”. These words are in [this topic](https://forum.spacecubics.com/t/topic/27). Many words work but these don’t. I don’t see any pattern whether a word works or not.
Is there a way to check the generated search index on the hosted instance? I can read both Ruby and Japanese so if there is a way to see how Discourse generate search index for CJK, I might be some help.
[CppjiebaRb](https://github.com/erickguan/cppjieba_rb), or [cppjieba](https://github.com/yanyiwu/cppjieba/blob/master/README_EN.md), mentioned by @tgxworld seems to be for Chinese. Is it used for Japanese locale?
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [2 בפברואר, 2022, 10:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/29 "2022-02-02T10:21:26Z")
Mecab is sadly not an option, it is GPL and we prefer only to take on MIT and BSD licenses in dependencies
We have a PR that will add [TinySegmenter: Javascriptだけで実装されたコンパクトな分かち書きソフトウェア](http://chasen.org/~taku/software/TinySegmenter/) which has a compatible license. Can you try out the segmenting and let us know how well it works, there is a form on the website you can use to test
---
### Author:  [@yashi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/yashi)
#### Post date: [2 בפברואר, 2022, 10:58am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-a-term-in-japanese/97359/30 "2022-02-02T10:58:57Z")
I’ve tried [tiny\_segmenter](https://rubygems.org/gems/tiny_segmenter) from Rubygems and at least it does generate the words I’ve listed in the previous comment.
```ruby
# coding: utf-8
require 'tiny_segmenter'
require 'pp'
s = File.read('topic27.txt')
ts = TinySegmenter.new
sg = ts.segment(s, ignore_punctuation: true)
pp(sg)
```
```shell
bundle exec ruby test.rb | grep -e 北側 -e 真上 -e 一般
"北側",
"真上",
"一般",
"一般",
"一般",
"北側",
"一般",
```
A quick search about TinySegmenter told me that the model it uses isn’t as good. There is model generator for it.
[https://github.com/shogo82148/TinySegmenterMaker](https://github.com/shogo82148/TinySegmenterMaker)
I haven’t tried it though.
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