(sorry for cross postings - I think this is important information to
disseminate)
Executive Summary: you probably need to increase your query slop. A
lot.
We recently had a feedback ticket that a title search with a hyphen
wasn't working properly. This is especially curious because we solved
a bunch of problems with hyphen searching AND WROTE TESTS in the
process, and all the existing hyphen tests pass. Tests like "hyphens
with no spaces before or after, 3 significant terms, 2 stopwords" pass.
Our metadata contains:
record A with title: Red-rose chain.
record B with title: Prisoner in a red-rose chain.
A title search: prisoner in a red-rose chain returns no results
Further exploration (the following are all title searches):
red-rose chain ==> record A only
"red rose" chain ==> record A only
"red rose chain" ==> record A only
"red-rose chain" ==> record A only
red rose chain ==> records A and B
red "rose chain" ==> records A and B (!!)
For more details and more about the solution, see
http://discovery-grindstone.blogspot.com/2010/11/solr-and-hyphenated-words.html
- Naomi Dushay
Senior Developer
Stanford University Libraries
