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New detailed search option: Scope

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 3:43 pm
by Andrew Lee
Webfork sent me a PM telling me that when searching for eg. "7-zip", he gets a lot of other entries with "zip" or 7-zip" in their description. He asked if there's a way to prioritize the actual 7-zip DB entry in the final listing.

After mulling over it, introducing another sort order that prioritizes search results with keywords found in the title turns out to be more complicated than I thought. A simpler way was to introduce a new parameter in the detailed search page called "Scope", that lets you determine which fields you want to search.

So for the example that webfork mentioned, searching for "7zip" within only "Keywords" will turn up the exact entry that he wants.

Thanks to webfork for bringing this to my attention. Do lemme know if you find any bugs.

Re: New detailed search option: Scope

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 5:15 pm
by Specular
I've often wanted this :) What I've found though is searching '7-zip' for the Title only search doesn't return the entry. Is there a reason for this, such as the search being confused by the - symbol?

Edit: searched again and it now appears using the Title only search. Strange. DiskInternals ZIP Repair also is returned for some reason.

Re: New detailed search option: Scope

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 8:04 pm
by Andrew Lee
I've often wanted this :) What I've found though is searching '7-zip' for the Title only search doesn't return the entry. Is there a reason for this, such as the search being confused by the - symbol?
It's not actually "confused" :D That's how MySQL text search works. Spaces and non-alphanumeric characters are treated as delimiters, so you get two tokens "7" and "zip". Tokens less than 3 characters are discarded, so you are left with "zip". That was why the "Keywords" field was introduced, to combat the limitations of MySQL text search in such cases.

I think Google spoils us so much we often forget how difficult and complex a problem free text search is when dealing with non-alphanumeric characters and special names!

For most cases, if you want to reach the database entry of a particular app quickly, turning off "Description" (leaving "Title" and "Keywords") will be ideal. Then you can just type "7zip" (without the hyphen) and get what you want.