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  • Having a / in a title seems to screw up searching for it. For instance
    For Sale: British Made Backpacks/Daysacks
    Can't be found searching on british backpacks. You need the whole backpacks/daysacks or it won't find anything

    Whereas something like
    For Sale: British Made Mini Messenger Bags
    Can be found searching on british bag

    Noticed this on a few thread titles.

  • It's not the / , but the lack of space between words.

    The search uses a language search, which uses natural phrases and a process called stemming.

    This search engine attempts to take a word like "cycling" and "cycle" and will save both as "cycl-" for the purpose of a search. Then when you search "cycling" it actually searches "cycl-" and finds matches that have minor differences in plural, modifier, etc.

    The problem comes that when there is a lack of a space, i.e. "cycling/running", this produces a different output... "cycling/running"... why no stem? Because it cannot find the whole word (up to the next space) in a dictionary and therefore cannot determine the modifiers that are valid.

    Anyhow... "cycling/running" is not a hit for the stem "cycl-" that you may search for.

    The only way to ensure the search engine works is to use spaces around words, or to restrict the punctuation used to separate words to the classic ones: comma, full-stop, question mark, exclamation mark.

    The search engine is doing what it should do, because the major complaint of the old one was that it was too precise ("cycle" would never match "cycles"). That is now solved as we're using a language search, but it comes at the loss of exact match precision for non-dictionary words (and lack of spaces in your example is creating a word "Backpacks/Daysacks").

    Solution: Anyone selling stuff, to ensure it gets found, really shouldn't smash words together without spaces using /. Instead, use a comma delimited list with spaces.

  • Doesn't "/" count as a word break in most pattern-matching systems? Is there a downside to counting it as a word break?

  • Cheers for the detailed answer although a shame it doesn't seem to have an easy solution.

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