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Searching syntax for NOT

samuel_penn

Hi,

Using the web search UI, is it possible to search for documents which don't include a term? For example "forms -wcm" to find documents which include 'form' but not 'wcm'. + works to force a term to appear, but I can't find anyway of enforcing a NOT.

Thanks,
Sam.

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Comments

dinger

Have you seen this: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Search#Simple_Queries

However, I think this documentation is a bit poor and there needs to be a simple search page that explains what a user might want to use.

Rob

samuel_penn

I don't think I've seen that page, but I've seen similar pages (including most of those that page links to). Much of the documentation is very detailed but low level - I haven't been able to find anything that really talks about search from a user's perspective (apart from the basic UI walk through).

The page does mention that '-' should be used as a NOT. Trying that again seemed to work… but further tests seem to show that it is inconsistent. For example, I have four files which I'm using to test, the names and content of which are as follows:

serco.html

The Serco Vulture Guardian is very nice and is like a kettle of fish with three cows and a boomerang glued to it. That didn't make any sense at all, but what the hell, it's only a test.
‍‍‍

vulture.html

A small light thing which is very thin and hard to hit.
‍‍‍

vendetta.html

The nations of Vendetta include the Serco and the Itani, as well as the cowardly traders known as UIT.
‍‍‍

itani.html

The Itani have a nice light fighter called the Valkyrie as their thingy, which is better than the vulture but not as big as a behemoth, which is pretty much to be expected.
‍‍‍

Searching for "vulture serco" returns all four (correct).

Search for "serco" returns serco.html and vendetta.html (correct).

Search for "serco -vulture" also returns serco.html and vendetta.html (WRONG, since serco.html contains the word 'vulture').

Search for "-serco vulture" returns vulture.html and itani.html (correct).

Changing the order of the search terms, or the capitalisation, doesn't seem to have any effect. Changing the case of search words in the actual files also doesn't seem to fix it, and the results are the same as above. Note that I am typing the search queries into the quick search field at the top right of the UI, and I'm not including quotes in what I type. All four files were created at the same time by the same user, and there's been ample time for any indexing to be performed.

Sam.

dinger

Just had a thought… you do realise that the default behaviour for Alfresco is to OR the search terms?

You can change this in the web-client-config-custom.xml file or figure out what the AND term is (anyone?)

Give that go!

Rob

samuel_penn

You can force an AND by preceding the terms with '+'. So a search for "foo bar baz" returns documents with any of those search terms, but a search for "+foo +bar +baz" returns documents which contain all three search terms. As far as I can tell, that works. It's just the use of '-' which seems to sometimes return unexpected results.

I might try mixing + and - and see what happens then. However, it's definitely not behaving in the way other search engines I've used do.

Sam.

dinger

I don't know exactly how lucene works but would you not expect "serco OR -vulture" to return a document with serco in it?

Rob

samuel_penn

Good point, I was expecting the NOT to filter the returned results, when it doesn't.

So what happens is, "serco OR -vulture" returns serco.html, because though it fails the "-vulture", it does pass the "serco" part of the test.

However, if this is true, I'd also expect "vulture OR -serco" to return a document with vulture in it. This search should also return "serco.html", for exactly the same reasons as it is returned by the "serco OR -vulture" search. However, it isn't. So I'm still confused.

EDIT: I've created some more files, this time simplified specifically to test search: foo, bar, baz, foobarbaz, foobar, foobaz, barbaz. They all consist of various combinations of the words 'foo', 'bar' and 'baz' in the content and title (same in each), and a name with no spaces. Running the same tests produces the results I'd expect (so "foo -bar" returns foo and foobaz), so there's something else going on in my original test set.

Sam.