A Search Glitch?

[Starteck2002]

Not sure if this is only happening for me, but if i search 0-3 month, i get no results even when i click descriptions too. I know there are auctions on the site that have in titles and descriptions 0-3 month for baby clothes, 1 being from myself.

Is this a glitch just for me, or is this something that needs fixing. if it is happening for everyone could seriously affect peoples browsing enjoyment.

Hope it can be sorted

Kelly

[bykimbo]

Looks like some sort of problem, a variation on the problems we had before with hyphens, maybe.

If I search for "bundle 0-3 months" I don't see your item, but if I search for "bundle 0-3 month*" I do. The star should just mean "plus anything else" so they should both return your item, but don't.

[damian_steele]

The search software sees and uses the hyphen - in a different way to how you are intending it. To get around that you'll need to enclose the 0-3 in quotes so the search becomes "0-3" months. Then you can narrow down your search from there. This is not the ideal answer, but it does work.

[bykimbo]

Damian, they're supposed to have fixed that. The hyphen should only mean "minus" if preceded by a space. I think the problem is more quirky than that.

[damian_steele]

Damian, they're supposed to have fixed that.

Maybe so, but it doesn't look much like it.

[Starteck2002]

I have done various searches today as well for various things under different titles and the search facility really does seem to have some floors, if this doesnt work well, the buyers arent going to stay. This really needs to fixed asap, if buyers cant find what items they are looking for exp when the items are there then they are not going to stay and they will keep going back to the old ways to find items.

Hope this can be sorted asap.

[bykimbo]

If you can give as much detail as possible about the flaws you've found, it should speed up the process a bit. Fingers crossed!

[astral276]

I don't see why this appears so hard to fix; I know they have tried. It seems to be a simple parsing job of the search string. The only time the hyphen should be treated as keyword negation is if it is precededed by a space (unless the first character in the search string) and immediately followed by a keyword. i.e. 'keyword -keyword keyword' or '-keyword keyword keyword'. Any other usage should be treated as a literal hyphen.

That does leave a problem of how you handle whitespace when treating it as a literal hyphen. If a search is made on '3 - 30' do you also force a search on '3-30'?