"Inaccurate" query results when search phrase contains a hyphen

Jordan Wong

Vote:

Hi there,

We have a line of products essentially named "product-5", "product-6", "product-7".

We've run into an issue where some users are unhappy that searching with the phrase "product-5" will return not only product-5, but also product-6 and product-7 in the search results.

I've played around with different search phrases such as "product-abc" which will return no results, and "product-532skdfaj" which will return exactly the same results as searching for "product-5".

It seems that when a number follows a hyphen that anything after the hyphen is ignored.

Is there a way to fix this? Or are we going about something the wrong way? This is the code we are executing for the search:

query = client.Search(Language.English).For(searchPhrase)
.InField(v => v.ItemName)
.InField(v => v.ItemLongDesc)
.InAllField()
.WithAndAsDefaultOperator()
.UsingSynonyms();

Thanks in advance,
Jordan

#155322

Edited, Sep 14, 2016 6:45

Daniel Badro

Vote:

Hi this is probably related to that the - is a special char in ElasticSearch (the component that Find is a wrapper for)

Heres the list of chars that you should look out for.

+ - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \

'-' unhandled means exclude like + means include in ES

Thees needs escaping like this \-

Dont know if Find handles this but when I wrote my own search, I had to escape these chars otherwise I got exactly the same problem you have.

You can test adding withAndAsDefaultOperator(true) this forces that all the words seperated with (space or special chars) must match.

Hope this helps

#155372

Sep 15, 2016 9:44

Jordan Wong

Vote:

Hey Daniel,

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately escaping the hyphens didn't work for us.

It seems that escaping the hyphen essentially made find search for "product 5" instead of "product-5".

We are currently using withAndAsDefaultOperator as well.

Thanks,
Jordan

#155510

Sep 20, 2016 1:38