Forum Discussion
msUser327
Sep 11, 2019Copper Contributor
Search for Exact Phrase does not work
The "Exact Phrase" search option does not work. The instruction is to include the phrase in quotes. Example: If I search for "this exact phrase", the search results include all posts with any of ...
Allen
Community Manager
Sep 23, 2019Hi All,
Thank you my apologies that this has been missed in our review of threads.
So I did a search with terms in quotes and it seemed to work, in that results with this exact phrase were promoted over those which only had one or other of the terms I entered.
Is the issue that your expecting to only get 'exact' matches using the quote marks?
msUser327
Sep 27, 2019Copper Contributor
Just documenting here the e-mail sent earlier in the week...
Thanks for taking a look.
That's correct. An "exact phrase" search should only return results with the exact phrase,. The results should not include articles that simply have any of the individual words but not the exact phrase searched for.
The Advance search options ("Search Modifiers") include this text:
Use quotes to search for an "exact phrase".
That suggests that if you search for "a very specific phrase", using the quotes as in the Advance Search example, the results would only be those articles with the exact phrase [a very specific phrase] (no brackets) in the text, not results with "a" , "very", "specific", and/or "phrase" (no quotes) anywhere in the text.
If the "exact phrase" search is really designed to still include anything with the individual words even if the exact phrase never appears, it would be good to add that caveat to the "Use quotes to search for an "exact phrase"." description, maybe change that to "Use quotes to search for an "exact phrase"; articles with the individual words will still be included." so it's not misleading. It would be more helpful though if an exact phrase search were really just an exact phrase search.