Not a bug "Search titles only" doesn't seem to work properly

[karll]

Affected version

xenforo-2.0 xenforo-1.5

To be fair, I don't know if this is a problem with Enhanced Search or something else:

If you go to the Search box here on the Xenforo forum, type in e.g. "mariadb" and then tick the "Search titles only" checkbox. Then search.

I would expect to get a result containing only titles that has the search term "mariadb" in them. However, this is not what happens. A couple of the titles don't have the search term in them, e.g. "Centmin Mod LEMP users get another 5-40% boost in performance".

I also see this issue on my own forum, which is running the latest 1.5 version and the latest Enhanced Search version for XF 1.5.

This seems like a bug to me ...

 

[Russ]

Looks like one common trend is that the threads without mariadb in the title have it as a tag. Not saying that's how it should or shouldn't function but just something I noticed.

 

[Chris D]

That particular thread comes up because when indexing we append the tag list to the title to help make searches more relevant. That thread has a tag of "mariadb" hence it comes up when searching.

And considering the thread is specifically about a stack which includes MariaDB by default, I think that just goes to show that it is useful to do that.

Do you have any other examples?

 

[karll]

Right, that seems to explain the issue I've noticed on my own forum as well.

I agree that it makes sense to include the tags in that search.

Though perhaps then the checkbox ought to say "Search titles and tags only"? Obviously, not a big deal.

 

[Chris D]

Potentially but the problem there is that search is content agnostic and we can’t nevessarily guarantee that the content type you’re searching supports tags. I guess we could for the forum specific search but probably not a big deal. It’s mostly just a helper to improve result relevancy.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

Maybe the solution here would be to offer this as an option to apply to the search indexer. I reported the same thing a while ago if you recall and the reply was obviously the same - it makes sense, so the option could be default to on, with a note about reducing search effectiveness or something.

I can see this causing confusion for forums converting from other software, where this behaviour didn't exist, and their users wanting to return to the old behaviour.


Fillip