What's the right way to do an OR search in Discourse?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

charleswalter is trying to create a search query in Discourse that includes multiple keywords with an OR condition, but is unable to get the desired results. TheLOLxd2 suggests that adding “OR” to the search query only adds noise and does not produce the expected results. charleswalter believes that a good search engine should be able to return similar items, such as “covid-19” or “coronavirus”, without requiring separate searches. awesomerobot mentions that Data Explorer is the only current solution, and shares a link to a related discussion on the topic. Alternatively, codinghorror suggests using Google’s site: search term to target a specific domain and achieve the desired results.

1

I’m trying to link to coronavirus / covid topics in our community, but I couldn’t figure out how to create an OR query.

I thought this might work:
https://www.helloforos.com/search?expanded=true&q=coronavirus%20OR%20corona%20OR%20covid%20order%3Alatest

but I see it doesn’t have many of the latest topics that simply mention coronavirus
https://www.helloforos.com/search?expanded=true&q=coronavirus%20order%3Alatest

For the future, would be interesting to be able to create topics in Discourse where we can group keywords related to a topic and link to the query.

2

I don’t believe there is one. Adding “OR” only adds noise to the search query, unfortunately.

3

But to provide an accurate list of results, a good search engine should be able to return at least similar items, ie covid-19 or coronavirus, and not rely on user to need to do separate searches.

Are we sure there’s no way to do it today in discourse?

4

Data Explorer is the only way at the moment.

5

Do it through google targeting your website. There is a Google search term to isolate all google results to a specific domain, called site: