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Can Search on partial matches be improved?

Archived Chris Reppy 11 years ago

Does anyone know of a way to improve the Results found on partial word searches? It seems like relevant topics are being excluded from Search Results because it's only returning exact matches.


For example, if a user searches our Community using the word 'answer' they only get 4 results but if they search using the word 'answers' they get 5 results.


I'm unsure if this needs to be addressed in UseResponse or if I can somehow improve searching via a MySQL setting. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Replies (6)

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Chris,

You're right, we have just tested this.

We have added searching algorithm improvement to our roadmap that will be available in next release.

As for now, there is no quick solution to be shared.

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Hi Paul - I didn't notice this specifically mentioned in the recent release.


Have improvements been made to the searching algorithm?

Are there any additional improvements planned for upcoming releases?


We're using the latest version of UseResponse. Our customers are still having a hard time finding the content most relevant to their search. Any advice on what we can try to improve their experience?

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Hello Chris,

We'll consider adding more improvements to the search for 3.x release. No more changes in 2.3.x will be added as we are releasing only minor bug fixes and improvements.

All global changes will be done in 3.x

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FYI: My topic "How to increase precision of search results? e.g. using and, or, not,..." https://help.useresponse.com/responses/how-to-increase-precision-of-search-results-eg-using-and-or-not was merged with this one, even though my topic was about increasing search precision whereas this topic is about increasing search recall, so a completely different story.


The old text was: When searching for existing topics for "point screen key" at http://help.locusmap.eu I get over 500 results - far too many to go through as an end customer! I wanted to increase precision as usual by AND, NOT, OR, (), "", +, -, * etc. but none of them seems to work; all search terms are or-related. What syntax has to be used? And please add that topic in https://help.useresponse.com/knowledge-base] and also include https://help.useresponse.com/responses/can-search-on-partial-matches-be-improved into the docs.

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As you can see from the status - it's in progress and search results will be much better in 3.x stable release. We've already experimented on this, and it showed good results (at least maximum that you can take out of full text search).

As of now, there are no plans on integrating and parameters in search as it will be more precise and show less results

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Hi Stas,

> As of now, there are no plans on integrating and parameters in search as it will be more precise and show less results

ironically, higher precision is desperately needed because e.g. in Locus installation (http://help.locusmap.eu/ with Version 3.4.0) the search returns several hundred results where only 0-30 are really relevant (=contain all search terms). Hence, as a user, I don't easily find an existing answer in all the noise and many people file dupes.


Try it yourself and search "track ThisWordShallNotExist" which returns 567 results that you have to individually open and then use the browser search to find out that none/few of the results actually contain "ThisWordShallNotExist". That easily consumes half an hour. In a real life scenario, you'd have to repeat with alternative words for "ThisWordShallNotExist", so you can spend 1-2 hours for one single search - which would be done in some seconds with AND keyword! Please, add some way to and-connect search terms.


Thanks, Georg

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It would be helpful to have some statistics showing how % of people that found their answer on an existing question vs posted a new one vs commented on an existing or something like that to measure the reduction in customer service needs.

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We've integrated the search on partial matches, so it gives more accurate results starting from 3.2 version.


Also, we start to log users search requests, but will implement the reports section on precision of results in the later releases.

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