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).
Comment | File | Size | Author |
---|---|---|---|
#9 | 546302c.patch | 2.23 KB | jhodgdon |
#6 | 546302b.patch | 2.22 KB | jhodgdon |
#1 | 546302.patch | 2.05 KB | jhodgdon |
Comments
Comment #1
jhodgdonHere is a patch with a suggested change to the help text.
Comment #2
jhodgdonComment #3
Dries CreditAttribution: Dries commentedThis works for me and looks RTBC. (Technically, another possible solution is to switch to a different search module like Apache Solr/Lucene, Sphinx, etc.)
Comment #4
jhodgdonDo 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.
Comment #5
Dries CreditAttribution: Dries commentedSolr even provides spell checking, a la: "Did you mean Drupal instead of Drupla?". So yes, they do.
Comment #6
jhodgdonOK, how about this version?
Comment #7
jhodgdonComment #9
jhodgdonHere's a re-rolled patch that should apply better.
Comment #10
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedComment #11
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedI'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'
Comment #12
Dries CreditAttribution: Dries commentedCommitted to CVS HEAD. Thanks!
Comment #14
jhodgdonLooks like this was committed in #12 and status wasn't updated.