Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
Words ending in 's' get weird responses, too.
For example, I searched
on "loris" and got lots of things with 'lori' in them. Even when it
found the
whole word, it bold-faced the 'lori," not the whole word.
This is an excellent example of a case where my "trick" fails. Even
so, I think that the results are qualitatively improved _on average_
by squashing 's'. The best example would be 'horse' and 'horses'.
There
are many similar cases. People may search for 'president' or
'presidents'.
Since our database is not _huge_, squashing the 's' isn't bad.
There's a better way, a better version of this trick, and I could
program that.
What should happen is that the _exact_ term gets a "score" boost, so that those
results tend to show up higher. But we should still return results from the
'squashed' version. This is a nice balance. So, for 'Loris' you should
find
the _exact matches_ at or near the top, but then 'Lori' results further down.
This means that if you search for 'horses', you'll get 'horses'
results first,
in case that's EXACTLY what you meant. But if you're just searching for every
article that mentions 'horse', you'll also get a good result.
I'll think about how to make this change, but I think I'll hold off until we have
some experience with the php/mysql search engine. I think it'll be sort of o.k.,
but I think with some creativity, I can do something that will beat it.
--Jimbo