Searching for compound words doesn't appear to work

[vr8hub]

I just tried searching for Haycraft-Queen on the Books page, and it returned a bunch of books that had "Queen" somewhere, but none of the Haycraft-Queen series books.

I then tried it with quotes around it, "Haycraft-Queen", and it returned no books.

I then tried just Haycraft, and that didn't return anything, either.

The combination of those don't make sense to me—it seems that it's splitting the two words and searching for them individually, but it's not finding either of them in the "Haycraft-Queen" series name?

I then tried Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones, and it did return the Haycraft-Queen items (because of Cornerstones presumably), but it also returned anything with just queen in it (and, I'm assuming, anything with just cornerstones in it, but there was 18 pages and I didn't go them them all :) ). Putting quotes around the whole thing, "Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones", again returned nothing.

Pulling up one of the series' books and clicking on the collection name does return all the books in the collection, but surely we should be able to search for the collection name to find them?

I would think the interface should search for a compound word as a whole before it searches for it's component parts?

Also, shouldn't we be able to put quotes around something to have it search for the entire term rather than individual pieces of it? In this case I don't want the "queen"s, I just want the "Haycraft-Queens."

[acabal]

@colagrosso

[colagrosso]

Thanks for the report, Vince, and sorry for the trouble.

I'll take a closer look, but I believe the problem is that:

1. We remove hyphens from the user's search query here
2. We also remove hyphens from the collection title in the index here

I'll test this out to see if there are other problems. The fix will require code changes to the lines above and re-indexing the IndexableCollections column.

Regarding your question about quotes, we recently (Feb 2025) enabled support for searching with quotes. For example, searching for "war and peace" works:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=%22war+and+peace%22

So after we fix the problem with hyphens, your "Haycraft-Queen" example should work, too.

[vr8hub]

Ignoring whether we should eliminate hyphens for a second, if they're eliminated both from the query and from the index, why doesn't the query work? IOW, if the first is turning my query into "HaycraftQueen" and the second is turning the index into "HaycraftQueen," then why isn't the former finding the latter?

Back to the hyphens, and this might be a bigger can of worms that shouldn't be opened. :)
Searching for "queen" finds anything that has queen in it wherever we're searching (I don't know all the places we're searching, but it's not pertinent to the discussion.) My expectation, which again may be unreasonable, is that searching for queen would find the queen in Haycraft-Queen, because it's a "word" within that phrase. Same for Haycraft.

Thus, if we had an author with a compound name Alpha-Beta, I would also expect to find him when searching for "Alpha" or "Beta". Or Alpha-Beta.

Again, maybe that's unreasonable. Or not in scope. Consider this the ramblings of a mad man. :)

[colagrosso]

Thanks for the additional comments, Vince. Responses inline.

Ignoring whether we should eliminate hyphens for a second, if they're eliminated both from the query and from the index, why doesn't the query work? IOW, if the first is turning my query into "HaycraftQueen" and the second is turning the index into "HaycraftQueen," then why isn't the former finding the latter?

The problem was that I made a mistake in the lines I linked to above. The query is being turned into haycraft queen (with a space), and that isn't matching what is in the index, which is haycraftqueen (without a space).

I sent out PR #486 to fix that.

Back to the hyphens, and this might be a bigger can of worms that shouldn't be opened. :) Searching for "queen" finds anything that has queen in it wherever we're searching (I don't know all the places we're searching, but it's not pertinent to the discussion.) My expectation, which again may be unreasonable, is that searching for queen would find the queen in Haycraft-Queen, because it's a "word" within that phrase. Same for Haycraft.

Thus, if we had an author with a compound name Alpha-Beta, I would also expect to find him when searching for "Alpha" or "Beta". Or Alpha-Beta.

Again, maybe that's unreasonable. Or not in scope. Consider this the ramblings of a mad man. :)

For the search index that we're using, if the user searches for queen it won't match against haycraftqueen because there isn't an efficient way to match against parts of terms in the index that aren't at the beginning. Our search form doesn't support it, but in the future we could enable an advanced search where the user could query haycraft* and that would match haycraftqueen if we ran the search in boolean mode. As of today, we don't support the * operator.

To use your other author name example, the user would have to query Alpha-Beta (or AlphaBeta) to get a match. Alpha won't work, and neither will Beta. Someday we could implement an advanced search that would support Alpha*.

[colagrosso]

Having typed all that out above, I suppose we could detect compound words add all three terms to the index:

1. alphabeta
2. alpha
3. beta

so that all three queries would match. I'll think about the for the future.

[acabal]

To use your other author name example, the user would have to query Alpha-Beta (or AlphaBeta) to get a match. Alpha won't work, and neither will Beta. Someday we could implement an advanced search that would support Alpha*.

For now I don't think we should be boolean matching because almost nobody actually searches that way anymore.

I do think if we search for beta it should match Alpha-Beta. Likewise searching queen should match haycraft-queen. However, searching for neill should not match o'neill, but searching for o'neill or oneill should.

What if we made a special case for dashes, in which we replace dashes with a space but all other non-alphanumeric characters with the empty string?