CGI Exclusion Search Oddity

[Matt]

Hello,

A. Doing a search today for capabilities, I returned 97 results.

B. Next, I tried capabilities building, which returned 30 results. Great so far!

C. Then I tried capabilities -building, which I expected to skip results containing the word building. Instead I see the same results as in B. above.

D. Experimenting, tried -building capabilities, which returned 67 results, none of which contain the building keyword. This is the result I want.

I'm using the CGI version with a PHP SSI page.

Changing the match any search words to match all search words didn't seem to affect this behavior either.

In the example in your help section the excluded text appears after the keyword:

Exclusion/negative searches

You can precede a search term with a hyphen character to exclude that search term from being included in your search results. For example, a search for "cat -dog" would return all pages containing the word "cat" but not the word "dog".

Any idea why placing the excluded keyword first works, but not anywhere else in the search query? I'm concerned this may confuse my end users.

Thanks for your help!

[David]

There are a few settings that can effect the results displayed. For example the substring match feature.

In theory if the search is not an exact phrase search, the word order should not effect the results.

But can you post the URL to your web site so that we can examine the results in detail. Also can you check that you are using the latest version of the software. Older versions of the Zoom software didn't support negative key words.

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David