[RESOLVED]searching for browning

[Wajo357]

searching for browning yields: http://shmax.com/products/1?browse=0&s=browning

It should only show 1 or 2 results...

[engledogg]

I think it's turning up "brown" results from "Browning" because of something called a stemmer.  If I'm not mistaken, that is something that can be turned off, right shmax?

MIKE
engledogg

[shmax]

I think it's turning up "brown" results from "Browning" because of something called a stemmer.  If I'm not mistaken, that is something that can be turned off, right shmax?

MIKE
engledogg

Yep, that's the stemmer in action. I can turn it off, but then we would lose all the wonderfulness it is doing (ie. finding "wolf" when you search for "wolves"). I think what I need to do is find some way to adjust the relevance such that exact matches (containing "browning") come first, but I'm gonna put this is sort of low priority for now, as I'm still deep in this big refactor I'm working on.

[shmax]

bump

[shmax]

I think the solution for this is going to be to switch things over to a commercial grade search product. We've done okay up until now with my own lame attempt at search, but it has a lot of drawbacks and there's no reason to go any further with it. I'll start researching some options.

[Tripredacus]

This works too, searching on Google

Code Select

site:shmax.com/product_details Browning

[shmax]

Still working on it. This is a tiny bug that requires an epic fix. I'll have more information soon.

[Tripredacus]

I wanted to note, regarding my google comment. Not everything is indexed on the site and not everything is as up to date. So using google might help, but it won't find everything for you.

[shmax]

I wanted to note, regarding my google comment. Not everything is indexed on the site and not everything is as up to date. So using google might help, but it won't find everything for you.

Naw, that's not what I meant by search product. I'll be integrating something internally (you end users won't notice anything different, other than slightly improved behavior), such as Solr, Sphinx, or one of the storage engines built into MariaDb (any of which are an improvement on the full text features already in use). I say the fix is epic, because using any of the above leads into upgrading the entire stack (OS, language, database) in use by shmax.com (which is currently in progress), and then I have to tear out the existing search stuff and rewrite it, all before the new Assassin's Creed games come out. 

[shmax]

The server upgrade is complete! We now have the latest versions of the OS, database, and scripting languages available. This has opened up a whole world of new possibilities for search, so I've moved on to exploring solutions to the stemmer/relevance problem we've been discussing.

[shmax]

Experiment #1 is live. Try searching for "browning", now...

http://www.shmax.com/products?topic=2346&q_filters_keywords=browning

[Tripredacus]

Experiment #1 is live. Try searching for "browning", now...

http://www.shmax.com/products?topic=2346&q_filters_keywords=browning

What is experiment #1.... adding a primary sort for results showing exact matches first, then showing the other matches afterwards?

It could be (maybe in the future) if a search result returns less than 3 items, there is an option to expand the search terms to a more generic result... although in the case of Browning, it may not be wise to return things with the color brown in them... But if, say, a result of 3 or fewer, a preview for the result of the shown results on the page. Let's say 10 items per page, search returns 3 matches, the other 7 would be "maybe you mean this" types. Just some ideas.

[shmax]

What is experiment #1.... adding a primary sort for results showing exact matches first, then showing the other matches afterwards?

Sorting by relevance. There's a lot of academics and math behind the relevance computation that I'm not even going to try to understand, but I'm able to nudge the scores with special operators. What I'm doing here is nudging the importance of the word's added stem downward, such that "brown" gets nuked by "browning".

As for your suggestion, it's a form of query expansion, and is actually directly supported by the storage engine I'm using. So definitely doable; anybody want to second the motion?

[Spiff-O-Matic]

Probably too late to be helpful now, but on my site www.maperformance.com we use a search provider called SLI. It is very powerful... but I'm not sure what kind of cost tiers there are.

http://www.sli-systems.com/

[Tripredacus]

Probably too late to be helpful now, but on my site www.maperformance.com we use a search provider called SLI. It is very powerful... but I'm not sure what kind of cost tiers there are.

http://www.sli-systems.com/

Hmmm welp... it seems your site has the same problem.