The help screen for the search module should make it clear to site administrators that without installing an n-gram or stemming module, only exact word matches are supported in search.

The reason I think this is important is that with Google and other web searches, people have gotten used to being able to search for, say, "walk" and find web pages with words like "walking", "walked", etc. in them. Drupal core search does not currently support that, and the help text should make that clear. It always surprises people that Drupal's core Search module doesn't support this.

Ideally, I think the help screen would also say that you can install an n-gram or stemming module to change this behavior, but since these are contrib modules, I don't know about the politics of adding this text to the help screen.

There is also a move afoot to add n-gram to search, see #103548: Partial Search in Drupal Core. If this is implemented, the help text would need to change, but I think it would still be beneficial to add a mention of stemming, since for some sites, depending on the language, stemming may be a better approach than n-grams (it is more efficient, and since it relies on linguistics, should be more accurate than the blind n-gram approach).

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#9 546302c.patch2.23 KBjhodgdon
#6 546302b.patch2.22 KBjhodgdon
#1 546302.patch2.05 KBjhodgdon
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Comments

jhodgdon’s picture

Issue tags: +ui-text
FileSize
2.05 KB

Here is a patch with a suggested change to the help text.

jhodgdon’s picture

Status: Active » Needs review
Dries’s picture

This works for me and looks RTBC. (Technically, another possible solution is to switch to a different search module like Apache Solr/Lucene, Sphinx, etc.)

jhodgdon’s picture

Do those search engines do substring matches in some way? I'm not familiar enough with them to know, and thought the main advantage of Solr etc was that they were more efficient for larger sites.

Dries’s picture

Solr even provides spell checking, a la: "Did you mean Drupal instead of Drupla?". So yes, they do.

jhodgdon’s picture

FileSize
2.22 KB

OK, how about this version?

jhodgdon’s picture

Issue tags: -ui-text +Help text

Status: Needs review » Needs work

The last submitted patch failed testing.

jhodgdon’s picture

Status: Needs work » Needs review
FileSize
2.23 KB

Here's a re-rolled patch that should apply better.

BryanGullan’s picture

Assigned: Unassigned » BryanGullan
BryanGullan’s picture

Status: Needs review » Reviewed & tested by the community

I've taken a look at the extra help detail and it looks good to me. Taking into account the comments above along with the fact that #103548: Partial Search in Drupal Core: Implement N-Gram searches is at 'needs work' status and therefore unlikely to be completed before code freeze, I'm putting this to 'reviewed'

Dries’s picture

Committed to CVS HEAD. Thanks!

Status: Reviewed & tested by the community » Needs work

The last submitted patch failed testing.

jhodgdon’s picture

Status: Needs work » Fixed

Looks like this was committed in #12 and status wasn't updated.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)
Issue tags: -Help text

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.