Make it only search for what I put in the search box

I know there was a thread somewhere which said that the search had been improved to make it search for terms which you didn't put in the search box, but I can't find it.

Anyway, how do I make search only search for what I ask it to search for? Quotation marks don't seem to work.

eg I wanted to search for Tibble, not Tibbles or Tribble or Tibbling.

>1 DuncanHill:

Unfortunately we have to choose between having or not having "stemming," and we have chosen stemming. It *prefers* the form you give it, and adding quotes makes that stronger. For example, Tibble gives two "Tibble" books before the first "Tibbles" book, and adding quotes around it gives you three).

It won't give you Tribble for Tibble, because that's not stemming. (We could have turned on that, even more generous finding, but decided against it.) When this happens—for example, "Tribble" does get you "Tibble," it's because—underneath—it's searching editions, not "works," and some editions of a book by Tribble have the author as Tibble. Surfacing alternate titles in the work search is a bug, not a feature. If we didn't have it, you could only search for the one, final, winning English title of a work.

I understand opinions will differ on this. But we had to make a choice and, on balance, we think it's better to have stemmed forms available.

>1 DuncanHill:

I have updated the code to give more of a boost to exact matches, so Tibble now gives 3 "Tibble" books before the first "Tibbles" book, and adding quotes around it gives you 7.

It looks like opinions differ even within the LT staff. Fortunately knerd.knitter is the one actually writing the code here. ;-)

(I agree with her on the use of stemming in context, in that searching LT is a different situation from searching Google and stemming is less appropriate here. But Tim and I had this argument back when they changed catalog search, and I didn't convince him then either.)

Thanks for the explanation. I don't like it, especially as we cant go the end of search results anymore and work backwards. We get more irrelevant results and lose a way of going through them.

And giving returns for "liber" when searching for "liberalism" is going far too far in my opinion. Edited to add example 20:18 (UTC)

And the stemming really only works in English. In German I don't get the related words.

Search is borderline unusable for some terms - the stemming adds masses of irrelevant results, and as we only get the next page number to go to when a search returns multiple pages of results we can no longer do say 5 pages and come back later and click on 5, we have to click through one page at a time. I'm doing Liberalism now, am on page 13, only up to D. If I come back to it tomorrow I have to click through 13 pages to get back to where I am now.

Sorry to grumble but this is a real pain.

>5 DuncanHill: The issue with the page numbers on the search results is a bug that has been reported elsewhere; I will look into that.

What is the "liber" result you're getting when you search "liberalism"? Are you searching under Works? Are you using alphabetical or relevancy sort?

There was actually a bug causing the page number problem on the alphabetical sort for the works search. I have fixed that, so you should see more pages as well as the next button now. This is only applicable to the alphabetical sort, though, not the relevancy sort; that appears to have always just shown the pages on either side of the current page.

>5 DuncanHill: I guess I do see this result A Book of Emblems: The Emblematum Liber in Latin and English when I search "liberalism" and sort alphabetically. We do not actually control how the stemming works, so that is not something we can change. Most of the results do appear to contain "liberalism" however, and the relevancy search prioritizes the ones that contain the exact word over stemmed versions.

I think I had about seven or eight pages of "Liber" something, lots of "liberators" and "Liberations" and other irrelevant results, including lots of Latin books with nothing to do with Liberalism. Many many more results than I used to get for "liberalism", and pretty much none of the additions relevant.

Stemming might help people who don't know what they are looking for (though I remain to be convinced), it impedes people who do. A bad policy decision.

While I do get the pages up to 20 across the bottom now, when I go past 20 there's no page number.

Tim:

Stemmers are inherently language-specific. LT catalogs, to say nothing of the site itself, are not. Did this factor into your discussions about whether to use stemming, or was "But Google does it!" the extent of the conversation?

>12 lorax:

I thought "will Lorax hate this?"