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Bug 349839

Summary: [search] Search without word stemming
Product: [ECD] Orion Reporter: Boris Bokowski <bokowski>
Component: ServerAssignee: John Arthorne <john.arthorne>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P3    
Version: 0.2   
Target Milestone: 0.3   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows 7   
Whiteboard:

Description Boris Bokowski CLA 2011-06-20 11:38:56 EDT 
I wanted to search for occurrences of "functions" but got results that contain "function". We shouldn't strip the endings because we are searching in code, not natural language.
Comment 1 John Arthorne CLA 2011-06-23 14:33:39 EDT 
I think it should be possible to search for an exact term (perhaps using "function" or similar). I'm not convinced that we don't want the ability to do natural language search though. A lot of people have come to expect smart rather than dumb search algorithms, and I think many of the searches people do has this enabled (google search, Mac spotlight, typing in your browser address bar, etc).
Comment 2 Boris Bokowski CLA 2011-06-23 15:00:07 EDT 
Yes I agree that in some cases it is useful. However, I think the default should be to look for exact matches since that is what counts when editing and searching code. The compiler / interpreter / web browser also don't strip off endings.
Comment 3 John Arthorne CLA 2011-09-27 15:07:44 EDT 
I think we are forced into this now with the new search results UI. The client side is now repeating the search against the matching files returned by the server, in order to list all matches in the file. But now the client is doing a literal (unstemmed) search over search results that were generated with a stemmed search on the server. So the end result is the client shows a matching file but then indicates there are zero matches in the file.