Multiple exact phrases in a search.

[grantcv1]

I am somewhat puzzled by the exact phrase searching. It seems that a search of terms and phrases is short circuited after the first phrase. Is there some sort of limit to exact phrases? Is there some way around this? I am using version 5.1.

[Ray]

Can you give us some examples of what you mean? What did you search for and what were your results, and what did you expected to see.

A phrase is treated as a single search term. So if you have multiple phrases in a query, and yet you have "match any search term" selected, then potentially, you will get results which only match the second phrase and not the first.

[grantcv1]

Go to http://www.legisweb.com/cache/ca/indices/measures/search.cgi.

Set the category to 2007 and "any search words"

Type in the following search terms: "job training" "senate bill"
- 6 pages of results, more than 51 results.

Now try: "senate bill" "job training"
- 20 pages of results, more than 200 results.

Now try: "job training"
- 6 pages of result, more than 51 results.

Now try "senate bill"
- 20 pages of results, more than 200 results.

In playing with all sorts of search terms, it always seems that the search terms up to and including the first phrase are always used in the query. Anything after the first phrase is ignored.

Is this the case? Is this a bug? Is there a setting that changes this?

[David]

When this search is done you will see this message,
"Your search query contained too many common words to return the entire set of results available. Please try again with a more specific query for better results."

This message indicates that the engine didn't do a comprehensive search of all documents. Optimisations are used to return relevant sub-set of all the results much faster than might have otherwise been the case if all documents are searched.

This optimization kicks in with exact phrase searching which is more computationally intensive than single or multi-word searches.

If you don't care how long a search takes, and want to trade off speed for accuracy, you can reduce the optimsations performed via a setting on the Limits tab of the Zoom configuration window.