Closed Search term highlighting can be very inaccurate

X

Xon

Well-known member
Licensed customer
Affected version
2.3.3
When Xenforo displays search results, it attempts to highlight search terms in the resulting text. However this process is completely separate from the actual search results, which works fine with mysql full text search but produces very confusing results for end-users with XFES.

Elasticsearch can return highlighting match results, but this isn't used and XF currently doesn't have a way to export these into the search results and then to display it.

With text stemming, this can result in very confusing search results for the end-users.
 
Xon said:
With text stemming, this can result in very confusing search results for the end-users.
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It gets even more confusing if synonyms, keyword markers, stemmer overrides and decompounding are used - up to the point where I'd call it completely useless.

I would be really nice if there was a clean way for search implementations to provide highlighting instead of XF naive approach.
 
Automated triage: Design issue

Thank you for reporting this issue. Highlighting on the results page matches the words you typed against the result text, separately from how Elasticsearch matched them. Matches found through stemming, synonyms or decompounding therefore aren't highlighted. Changing this would need a new way for the search backend to supply its own highlights, which is a design change rather than a bug fix.

This is an automated assessment. A member of staff may review and update it.
 
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