Problems with stop word analysis and queries

Ruby Apps Ferret
1

I have a problem, and I think it’s because stop word analysis isn’t
happenning in the queries. I think it’s the way ferret is doing things
that’s causing this bug. Let’s say I’m searching across documents with
a title. And I have a document with a title of “Bash Guide for
Beginners”. If a user types in the query:

Bash Guide for Beginners

No quotes. I get no hits. But if I drop the “for” ferret finds it.
Then say I type a quoted query like “Bash Guide for Beginners” ferret
finds it. So I tried all of this from a rails app, and I thought maybe
acts_as_ferret was doing something with the query to cause the “for”
word to stay in the query. But, I then opened up a script/console and
fetched the ferret index directly like:

findex = MyModel.ferret_index
findex.search(“Bash Guide for Beginners”)

And nothing came up. I tried all three queries, full title no quotes,
full title minus “for”, and quoted query with the same results as above.
So now I think it might be a problem with ferret. My theory is maybe
the stop word analysis isn’t taking place when I submit queries. That’s
my theory at least. Any ideas?

Charlie

2

On 10/17/06, Charlie H. [email protected] wrote:

Then say I type a quoted query like “Bash Guide for Beginners” ferret
So now I think it might be a problem with ferret. My theory is maybe
the stop word analysis isn’t taking place when I submit queries. That’s
my theory at least. Any ideas?

Charlie

Hi Charlie,
I’m afraid I can’t reproduce the problem here. So unless someone else
can help you I see you have two options. Try reproducing the problem
with a small script like this:

require 'rubygems'
require 'ferret'

index = Ferret::I.new(:or_default => false)
index << "Bash Guide for Beginners"
puts index.search('Bash Guide for Beginners')
index.close

Or you could send me the index off-list and I’ll have a look at it here.

Cheers,
Dave

3

Ok thanks for looking into. I’m going to try and reproduce it with
plain ferret, if not I’ll send you the index.

Charlie

David B. wrote:

On 10/17/06, Charlie H. [email protected] wrote:

Then say I type a quoted query like “Bash Guide for Beginners” ferret
So now I think it might be a problem with ferret. My theory is maybe
the stop word analysis isn’t taking place when I submit queries. That’s
my theory at least. Any ideas?

Charlie

Hi Charlie,
I’m afraid I can’t reproduce the problem here. So unless someone else
can help you I see you have two options. Try reproducing the problem
with a small script like this:

require 'rubygems'
require 'ferret'

index = Ferret::I.new(:or_default => false)
index << "Bash Guide for Beginners"
puts index.search('Bash Guide for Beginners')
index.close

Or you could send me the index off-list and I’ll have a look at it here.

Cheers,
Dave