On our vanilla search
When I search for:
“Pen” I get Pennsylvania results.
The same for “Penn,” and “Pennsyl” search terms
But when I search for “Pennsy” I get “no results found” for “Pennsy” but the other terms work as expected.
In Firefox - For this example the errant search string “Pennsy” just returns one result for our “members from Pennsylvania” group - but the behavior is equally weird.
No errors in the console, no clear issues in the XHR headers … just a vastly smaller response object (as one would expect from the behavior).
To rule out that this wasnt a version, or implementation issue, I tested it on metaDotDiscourse as well, and it happens here!
Note: it also happens for “Jus” (lots of results)
then “Just” gives only user results.
but “justi” gets forum reults.
Given the two examples, I imagine other search results do this as well.
Interestingly it doesn’t seem tied to the term length. So what’s going on is well beyond me!
unexpected behavior — a vastly different set of (or no) results for the same word root for which there is content.
the cross browser inconsistencies are quite odd, no??
Our end-users don’t know what stemming is, which as you point out is a technical research term.
With the post-title change, other discourse-deployers experiencing similar issues wont be able to locate it when searching the forum, and with this no longer being a bug report no one with potential to help improve the behavior will see it as something that may benefit from addressing.
If it is for a critical item that must be found in search, make sure you use tags, special words, or some other distinct marker. You may also be interested in search stop words: