Hi!
Thanks in advance for your help.
I’m having a bit of a problem with the search function. I type in a term to search, in this case the word “died” and I’m getting a lot of results that don’t include that word, either in the notes, or in my tags. This has happened with other searches. My best guess is that an item formerly included that word in its tags/notes, but was since deleted, and Tropy doesn’t know.
Right now I’m “Consolidating photos” in the hope that doing so will “refresh” Tropy’s knowledge about the terms in each item, but that’s just a guess.
Do you have any idea how I might get Tropy to only return relevant results in its search feature?\
Best,
JE
I’m also experiencing a problem with the search feature insofar as when I type in a search term that is plural, it also returns non-plural results. For example, typing in “swimming” and it also returns results for “swim”–is there a way to make the search feature return exact results?
Ok–a little more experimentation with plurals:
“CUPPING:” This returns all results for “CUPPING” and “CUPPINGS”
“CUPPINGS:” This returns all results for “CUPPING” and “CUPPINGS”
“CUPIN:” This returns no results at all.
So I’m a bit perplexed. Why would example 1 return results that include the word (cupping) plus an additional letter (s) and example 2 return results that include the word (cuppings) minus an additional letter, when example 3 doesn’t return any results for almost the whole word (cuppin), minus an additional two letters?
We’re aware that this can be confusing because the quick search field in its current form isn’t very flexible. The queries you enter are used to search in two separate full-text indices (one for notes and the other one for metadata). Words added to the full-text index are normalized in the process, diacritics are removed and the porter stemming algorithm is also applied, which removes common morphological inflections for English words. For this reason, both “cupping” and “cuppings” will be indexed to match “cup” as well as “cupping”.
Furthermore, if you enter a single word into the search field Tropy will always attach a wildcard (*) to the query. You can avoid this by adding quotation marks around your query. I think this probably explains the many results for the query died – which will end up searching for words matching di*. If you search for "died" instead you probably get better results.
Having said all this, we’re aware that this can be perplexing and we’re planning to add more search options in the future (specifically to make it possible to switch between fuzzy searching and exact matching).
Ok–thanks for the explanation! Very much appreciated! I’ll look forward to these improvements.