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Search engine improvement

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Home » Forums » Hymnary.org Development
Mon, 01/25/2010 - 17:54 — KenJ

As is, the search engine apparently deletes all punctuation, thus makes it impossible to find hymnal titles that include words like "Child's" and "latter-day" (for example) in them. Perhaps running the search engine's filter on hymnal titles and stripping them of punctuation and making that an ID that the search engine can find might do the trick. There are more possible solutions. You investigate, discuss, and determine what you think best.

KenJ


Comments

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 08:42 — hplantin

Hmmm, good point.

The solution is to strip the punctuation from the search string as well, I think. I'll put that on the todo list for this summer.

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Harry Plantinga
CCEL Director

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 08:51 — KenJ

The problem seems to be with punctuation inside words, such as hyphens and apostrophes as I noted.

KenJ

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 09:23 — hplantin

Hmmm. I typed "child's" into the firstline search box and it was automatically changed to "childs" and several results were returned. So apparently punctuation is being stripped correctly, at least in that case.

However, I typed "latter-day" and "latterday" into the search box and no results were returned. Do you know of a first line that contains "latter-day"? Also, do you have a specific example of a search that didn't work correclty?

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Harry Plantinga
CCEL Director

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 10:01 — KenJ

Not first lines... hymnal titles. :)

A Collection of Sacred Hymns for the Church of Christ of the Latter-Day Saints

A Child's Garden of Song

not found because the deletion of the punctuation closes up the words into one longer word such as LatterDay and Childs which cannot be found in Hymnal Titles. Perhaps a note would be enough to alert the searcher to use no punctuation, or when the punctuation is within a word then only use unbroken parts of the word such as Latter or Child. That works.

KenJ

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 09:53 — dianneshapiro

In the hymnal titles Latter-Day Saints doesn't appear to be hyphenated (Although, it is hyphenated in the denomination field) I found this by searching "Latter Day"

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 12:21 — KenJ

I gave an example of each word in a hymn title in a recent post. Latter-Day appears in some hymnal titles, but I think most are not hyphenated. If you search for Latter and/or Day you will find all hyphenated and non-hyphenated occurences, but miss some if you search for Latter-Day because search engine closes the space left by deleting the punctuation. I believe Church-Book is another example. Perhaps instructing searchers to not put punctuation in the search box.

KenJ

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 12:41 — KenJ

I could not find "The Church-Book" using the search engine. Is it only me? I know I'm living in The Twilight Zone... but.... Only by browsing and finding "Church-" after "Church".

KenJ

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 12:44 — hplantin

OK, I've updated the job ticket to say that the problem arises when searching for hymnals. Probably, this won't be addressed until this summer. For a work around, don't enter punctuation into the search terms you type in.

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Harry Plantinga
CCEL Director

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 12:51 — KenJ

Thank you, Harry. I agree it is not a high priority and your suggested work around should work, except searching for "church book" doesn't find "The Church-Book". I don't know why. The same thing happens when searching for "Latter Day", the hyphenated titles will not be found unless you use "Latter" OR "Day". You may want to re-word that work around if you decide to post it anywhere so that the searcher doesn't delete the punctuation like the search engine does. You will not find Childs in a hymnal title if you just delete the apostrophe from Child's, for example.

KenJ

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 13:10 — hplantin

Another hint: try typing your phrase (e.g. "latter-day") into the "Search the entire Hymnary" box. That one searches a little bit differently.

---------------
Harry Plantinga
CCEL Director

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 13:31 — KenJ

That works for hyphens because hyphens don't disappear in that box. The apostrophe does disappear though, so "Child's" will still not find any hymn titles because none of them have word "childs" in it. "Child" works though... in both search boxes.

KenJ

Tue, 01/26/2010 - 13:33 — KenJ

Thanks for all the assistance here. Every little bit helps. :)

KenJ

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