When I enter the three character search term POS, which in a linguistic community would be understood as “part of speech” Discourse takes a three letter prefix and returns all sorts of inappropriate topics. If I search here for POS i get topics and replies with works post, posts, position, possible, etc. or BOX the results include boxes, If I search amongst the LLVM community for PUBLICATIONS I get a raft of posts with example C/C++ source code that contain the word public. This prefix or lemma level search is highly frustrating and prevents the discovery of relevant material…
If this is a feature — as its move to that category suggests — then it is a bad one and becomes useless/
Why does feature not fit?
Having a look at the category description
It is not only about existing features but also about enhancements.
Maybe. However, as someone who worked on text retrieval systems for decades, this “feature” should be consider a bug. As it currently stands the search feature is practically useless for anything but the most trivial of searches.
You can get rid of all the post and postition results by searching for " pos ".
https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=%22%20pos%20%22
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Okay so it works but why isn’t it a user accessible feature? At least on the “advanced” search page where users could enable or disable stemming — making non-stemming the default would be less confusing — at their choice rather than having to remember arcane syntax. And " publication " produces different results from “publication” — includes publications — but maybe we are supposed to be satisfied that stemming to public doesn’t happen then.
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