Hello,
I have a small concern about the FTS negative term search syntax. Currently,
all terms following any minus sign ("-") are excluded from the search. This is
a very welcome feature, but consider searching for these hyphenated words:
Coca-Cola -> FTS finds Coca, but never Cola
low-budget -> FTS finds low, but never budget
twelve-year-old -> FTS finds twelve, but never year and never old
part-time -> FTS finds part, but never time
full-time -> FTS finds full, but never time
These results do not match what most users will expect. Well, one can ask them
to leave out the minus sign, but users will habitually leave it in because they
learned from major search engines that it is the intended behavior. Consider
Google, which explicitly states:
"Note: when you include a negative term in your search, be sure to include a
space before the minus sign."
Source:
http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=basics
Therefore I would like to consider adding these search syntax rules:
1. A minus sign excludes a search term only when located at the beginning of
the search query or after a white space (space, tab, etc.):
"low-budget" -> Find both low and budet.
"low -budget" -> Find low, but not budget.
"-low budget" -> Do not find low, but find budget.
"-low-budget" -> Do not find the "low budget" phrase.
2. In case the minus sign is a term separator and two or more search terms are
separated by sisngle minus signs only, they constitue a phrase search:
"twelve-year-old" -> "twelve year old" (phrase search)
"part-time" -> "part time" (phrase search)
I believe that these changes would make the FTS search syntax more intuitive to
use and more conformant to major search engines.
Would there be a chance that they could be implemented in current FTS3 and/or
the upcomming FTS4?
Any thoughts?
Ralf
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