Search is not working as expected

Have two notes: "test-b1"、"test-b2"

problem:
Search for "test b1", why is "test-b2" searched out?

Joplin 1.1.4

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Hmm, I expect it's due to fuzzy search. Is it any better if you put quotes around "b1"?

After adding quotation marks at both ends of the search term b1, it returns to normal.

You only need to add quotation marks when there are spaces in the search term.

There are no spaces in the search term, but quotation marks need to be added. Can this be optimized?

If you add quotes around b1 and you get the expected results then I think there's no bug to fix.

Well, I looked for recent topics about this, looks like I found it.

Fuzzy search isn't mentioned in https://joplinapp.org/#searching
I was surprised, when I searched for tolk, to get matches for talkative, tools, talc… And searching tolkien, it found talking, tailles and tiles.
The good news is that it no longer matches on full words only.
The bad news, is that I don't want that at all! I usually type what I want to search, and I don't want false positives.

I would appreciate an option to disable this fuzzy search by default.
And perhaps a way to enable it if I really need it, like ~tolk for example.

Adding quotes every time I search something is quite a hassle.

1 Like

@laurent

My English is not good. I agree with @PhiLho meaning. I hope to consider the suggestions of ordinary users. Thank you.

Can you please help to see:

After adding quotation marks, search for "a1". Why is the note of "a2" searched out?

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The order of search terms should not affect the search results. How should the screenshots be explained? Thank you

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What if we set the number of fuzzy matches to 1.

This means that if you type a search word incorrectly that doesn't exist anywhere in your notes, instead of getting no results, you still get matches to the nearest word.

On the other hand, if there is a word that matches your search, then you won't get any other matches.

Or we could make a new filter "fuzzy" that will activate fuzzy search.

fuzzy:1 my query

1 Like

At present, fuzzy search has caused more trouble than expected convenience.

Fuzzy search results in the need to filter useful information from a large number of search results, which is very time-consuming.

It is recommended to define the guide symbol for fuzzy search (such as "/"). Only when the guide symbol is used, the fuzzy search is performed. In other cases, the precise search is used.

@laurent @naviji @PhiLho

2 Likes

Yes, that's a good idea. Like we do for basic search.

I don't understand why that would be the case. The search results are sorted by "fuzziness". So if the results at the top don't contain the exact match you're looking for, there's no need to look any further. Matches only get fuzzier as you go down.

Did it not work for you that way?

Or maybe you could add a separator, say a horizontal line, maybe with a caption, to indicate that everything below are fuzzy matches. Something like this:

exact match 1
exact match 2
--- fuzzy matches ---
fuzzy match 1
fuzzy match 2
2 Likes

Is there any way to completely turn off fuzzy search? I don't want the search to be smart. I just want it to return a result if indexOf("searchTerm") >= 0.

There's no longer fuzzy search