WebHelp Search and boolean operators. Not working as expecte

[nickatwork]

Hi all,
We are releasing our online help in a few weeks and the Search doesnt appear to be working as I'd expect.
All topics have a heading, which the search seems to work with. As expected.

However, using the " " (quotes) and + (plus) dont seem to be returning results for topics that I know exist.

Example, I have a topic and it's heading is (renamed but you get the idea) "Your Options - Working from Important screens"

Now, a search of "Working from Enquiry screens" returns no results. None. This is confusiong, dont the " " (quotes) work as a find all of these words in this order, i.e. match this exact string. I thought that maybe because there were more words (Your Options -) thats why it didn't works. But alas, searching "Your Options - Working from Important screens" returns nothing as well.

I have also tried the + operator, Working+from+Important+screens and this also returns no results. I thought this worked in a find all of these words, but in any order. Again, returning nothing.

Any help, advice, or clarification about the boolean operators would be very helpful.

Additionally, I didn't think the search was case sensitive, is this wrong? It returns different results based on searching for Working and working.

Thanks.

[lacastle]

Here's the page from the flare help that explains how to search:
http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/Content/Fl ... =OUTW1011F

and here's a forum topic about search too:
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 13&t=10333

[nickatwork]

Thanks, but I've read over both of those before. I'm just confused as to why im not getting results back in the manner that I would expect, and in a lot of cases getting no results when I know there is a topic there that matches it.

[NorthEast]

One thing that can affect this are Flare's stop words; these are words like "is" and "the" that Flare will ignore in the search.

Annoyingly, if a stop word is included inside quotes, and even if that phrase exists, it won't appear in the search results.
For example, if I search for the phrase "Flare is great", it won't appear because "is" is a stop word.

You can get this to work if you switch off stop words (on the target Performance tab), but the drawback of this is an increased number of irrelevant search results in situations where someone uses a stop word.

[nickatwork]

aaahhh, thats the catch. stop words inside quotes. Sneaky Flare. Very sneaky.

Thanks for the heads up David. As long as I calrify that in our documentation it will be fine.

Thanks,

[LTinker68]

As long as I calrify that in our documentation it will be fine.

You mean your users actually read your documentation?

[nickatwork]

As long as I calrify that in our documentation it will be fine.

You mean your users actually read your documentation?

It is one of those very rare things, I know, but they do. It probably used just as much by the organisation as it is by our users. At least if they call, all we have to say is 'It's in the documentation, read it!'

On the stop-words thing, is it possible to edit the list of stop words that the search engine ignores? I had a look in the targets, but there was nothing.

Thanks,
Nick

[NorthEast]

On the stop-words thing, is it possible to edit the list of stop words that the search engine ignores? I had a look in the targets, but there was nothing.

No, there's nothing in the interface that allows you to edit the stop words; and I'm not aware of any hacks.

It's worth putting in a bug report, it should be able to handle stop words in quotes intelligently, rather than just display no results for a term that exists.