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Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

Formerly "Lemon Fool - Improve the Recipe" repurposed as Room 102 (see above).
Breelander
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Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404151

Postby Breelander » April 14th, 2021, 12:11 pm

For an investment site, surely the word 'dividend' is an important search term? Apparently not....

Lemon Fool wrote:Information

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: dividend.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 9 characters excluding wildcards.
search.php?keywords=dividend

csearle
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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404160

Postby csearle » April 14th, 2021, 12:23 pm

Breelander wrote:...
I expect the flippin' search engine is playing a numbers game. If one wanted to search for Marks and Spencer it would avoid all the posts with "and" in them. I imagine it is the same mechanism.

Maybe some of the external search facilities for searching this site might be better in this regard?

Chris

Breelander
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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404163

Postby Breelander » April 14th, 2021, 12:38 pm

csearle wrote:...it would avoid all the posts with "and" in them....


Actually you CAN search for 'and' - if you add a wildcard. Not exactly an intuitive solution though....

search.php?keywords=and*

dealtn
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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404173

Postby dealtn » April 14th, 2021, 1:00 pm

Breelander wrote:For an investment site, surely the word 'dividend' is an important search term? Apparently not....

Lemon Fool wrote:Information

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: dividend.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 9 characters excluding wildcards.
search.php?keywords=dividend


Isn't it the opposite problem? It's not ignoring "dividend" but the search brings up too many results to be useful - as it's too common?

csearle
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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404185

Postby csearle » April 14th, 2021, 2:00 pm

Breelander wrote:For an investment site...
Maybe you should search for "growing dividend" ;) C.

Breelander
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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404190

Postby Breelander » April 14th, 2021, 2:30 pm

dealtn wrote:Isn't it the opposite problem? It's not ignoring "dividend" but the search brings up too many results to be useful - as it's too common?


On its own, maybe. But as a qualifier in a search it should reduce the number of results. I specifically wanted to search for "Barclays dividend" and instead got hundreds of results that just included "Barclays"

Gengulphus
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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404195

Postby Gengulphus » April 14th, 2021, 2:41 pm

Breelander wrote:
dealtn wrote:Isn't it the opposite problem? It's not ignoring "dividend" but the search brings up too many results to be useful - as it's too common?

On its own, maybe. But as a qualifier in a search it should reduce the number of results. I specifically wanted to search for "Barclays dividend" and instead got hundreds of results that just included "Barclays"

Well, following up on your own earlier comment, searching for "Barclays dividend*" seems to reduce them very effectively! Indeed, perhaps too effectively... :-(

Gengulphus

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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404797

Postby Mike4 » April 16th, 2021, 7:09 pm

dealtn wrote:
Breelander wrote:For an investment site, surely the word 'dividend' is an important search term? Apparently not....

Lemon Fool wrote:Information

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: dividend.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 9 characters excluding wildcards.
search.php?keywords=dividend


Isn't it the opposite problem? It's not ignoring "dividend" but the search brings up too many results to be useful - as it's too common?


How can "too many results" not be useful? Certainly gonna be more useful than none whatsoever.

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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404814

Postby dealtn » April 16th, 2021, 7:52 pm

Mike4 wrote:
dealtn wrote:
Breelander wrote:For an investment site, surely the word 'dividend' is an important search term? Apparently not....

search.php?keywords=dividend


Isn't it the opposite problem? It's not ignoring "dividend" but the search brings up too many results to be useful - as it's too common?


How can "too many results" not be useful? Certainly gonna be more useful than none whatsoever.


If the programme has a threshold output from an enquiry such that if number of results > x then error (or print "the following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common ... "), for instance.

Or do you think that is a more optimal outcome, and more useful, than "none whatsoever"? It looks the same to me.

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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404851

Postby Itsallaguess » April 16th, 2021, 9:57 pm

Breelander wrote:
dealtn wrote:
Isn't it the opposite problem? It's not ignoring "dividend" but the search brings up too many results to be useful - as it's too common?


On its own, maybe. But as a qualifier in a search it should reduce the number of results.

I specifically wanted to search for "Barclays dividend" and instead got hundreds of results that just included "Barclays"


This is one of those situations where Google search is likely to give highly improved results over the limited internal search facilities here.

Google search can be asked to only look on specific sites, so we're able to force it to look at lemonfool.co.uk, and then we can add words to search for with a '+' between the words, which means that returned Lemon Fool pages will contain both 'Barclays' and 'dividend' if required.

In addition to that, we can then ask Google search to limit returned pages based on timescales, so on the example below, we're using all the above tricks to limit returned pages from the past year, although other options for a number of other default timescales are available (hour / day / week / month), as well as a facility to define a custom date-range too...

Image

For anyone interested in investigating the above Google Search process, here's the above Google Search URL link itself that will show the above example in action -

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:lemonfool.co.uk+barclays%2Bdividend&tbs=qdr:y

Note from the above URL search results, that Google Search is clever enough to return both 'Barclays+dividend' results, as well as 'Barclays+dividends' results too, which is also another useful intelligent-search benefit of using the above Google process for these types of more granular searches...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

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Re: Why does Search ignore some really useful words?

#404877

Postby Mike4 » April 17th, 2021, 4:39 am

Itsallaguess wrote:This is one of those situations where Google search is likely to give highly improved results over the limited internal search facilities here.

Google search can be asked to only look on specific sites, so we're able to force it to look at lemonfool.co.uk, and then we can add words to search for with a '+' between the words, which means that returned Lemon Fool pages will contain both 'Barclays' and 'dividend' if required.

In addition to that, we can then ask Google search to limit returned pages based on timescales, so on the example below, we're using all the above tricks to limit returned pages from the past year, although other options for a number of other default timescales are available (hour / day / week / month), as well as a facility to define a custom date-range too...



In addition, for those of us who like to use duckduckgo's anonymous searching, The Duck seems to do much the same:


Image


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