Request to fix the search engine

[Butterfly Affect]

If I search "Right hand path" it will eat the word "right" because its "too common a word" and then will show me results for "hand path". rhp and lhp do the same thing, and I think it also happens to other acronyms. Last I checked, a few other terms got eaten but I don't remember what they were off the top of my head.

 

[Yazata]

It's better than a while ago when every single term would give you 10 pages of search results that were all posts in one specific member's journal because he posted 50 times a day
But RHP and LHP have their own subforum though. If you click on the logo at the top left you see all different sections.

 

[SkullTraill]

I will look into whether I can adjust the “common” words list. I can’t just disable it cause there are words that are truly useless (of, the, a, etc). Perhaps “right” and “left” shouldn’t be in that list.

Beyond that I am afraid improved search won’t be on the books for a while (top tier searching requires vector search/storage which will get too expensive). I do recognize that the basic implementation of search (string matching algorithm) doesn’t carry context/sentiment/underlying meaning, and it does piss me off sometimes too especially when searching for something you don’t know the exact terms for. However a vector search solution just doesn’t align with the current income and usage of WF. String matching also works great for finding books and shit like that too which is 90% of searches on WF.

However - sorry for the ramble above - to get to your point, there is a trivial solution to bypass the common word filter if you have a legitimate query.

Just use quotation marks around your search term, and it will do an exact search instead of a split word search and that will ignore common word filters. So for example, instead of typing the following in the search bar:

right hand path

Type this instead

“right hand path”

That should fix your issue.