Search function?

    I typed in the exact name of a thread I was searching for: "Best Way to Equalize Volume Between Rigs and Performances on Kemper Stage" and I get: "No items matched your search terms: “Best Way to Equalize Volume Between Rigs and Performances on Kemper Stage”.


    How can it be that I put in the EXACT name and it can't find it?

    I wonder why the search function doesn't have the disclaimer: "Be sure to put everything in quotes or nothing will be revealed in your search"?


    I don't get why the quotes have to be there. It's a search engine, it should search for what I ask it to. I tried the quotes and it worked, thanks.

    Technically speaking in full text search indices you are typically searching for base forms of words. Input string is split by whitespaces, each word it brought to its base form and the search is performed for each token separately. Last stage combines partial results and returns an intersection of them. What quotes do is they change this default behavior and input is not split into individual words but you perform "search by phrase". This means the search engine will try to find documents where there is word "Be" followed by "sure" followed by "to"... This is different matching algorithm and it this case it worked better.


    In your case there probably is a token in your query which returned zero results (can happen if some works are blacklisted or not indexed for some reason), so intersection was also empty.


    I know it is technical and you should not be bothered with it as a user. But "quotes" trick apply to pretty much all search engines out there.

    Quote from piotrmaj

    Technically speaking in full text search indices you are typically searching for base forms of words. Input string is split by whitespaces, each word it brought to its base form and the search is performed for each token separately. Last stage combines partial results and returns an intersection of them. What quotes do is they change this default behavior and input is not split into individual words but you perform "search by phrase". This means the search engine will try to find documents where there is word "Be" followed by "sure" followed by "to"... This is different matching algorithm and it this case it worked better.


    In your case there probably is a token in your query which returned zero results (can happen if some works are blacklisted or not indexed for some reason), so intersection was also empty.


    I know it is technical and you should not be bothered with it as a user. But "quotes" trick apply to pretty much all search engines out there.

    Thank you so much for being patient and your enlightening response. I knew there was a "trick" to using search engines, but I didn't pay enough attention to the details. Good info thanks! I like how you explained the technical but made the topic very clear and understandable!