Phrase Search and advanced searching

[Sean Siler]

Well, I'm a new user and loving UR. As an IT Consultant, I have lots (and lots) of documents, web pages, etc that I have now organized into topic folders in UR. This works great. [Thanks!]

My question (and boy, do I feel silly): How do I perform a phrase search? Is it possible? I know the searches are keyword based, but I would love to be able to search for "RPC over HTTP" rather than 'RPC' and 'over' and "HTTP'. Any ideas?

Also, since I am admitting my investigatorial inadequacies, the entire concept of advanced searching completely escapes me. I've read the user's manual, but Vamp07's 'Filtering searches from searches' post was effectively written in Farsi, it was so beyond me.

Has anyone done an advanced search tutorial, by chance?

Any advice or assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[xja]

just put the search term in quotes, either in Quick Search or in the Value column in Advanced Search (I notice that if you put the search term in quotes in Quick Search, then switch to Advanced Search, it shows the term enclosed in asterisks.. makes sense).

I think it is really cool the way the search results in Quick Search update as you type!

[Sean Siler]

I have tried quotes, but keep coming up with no hits, so I figured I was doing it wrong.

[xja]

hmm. don't know what could be wrong. it works for me (I'm using version 1.1 in case that matters). type your search in Quick Search and then click "Advanced" and you will see exactly how it is doing the search. However, if you haven't figured out how the Advanced Search works, then it might not be that meaningful to you.

[Sean Siler]

Well, I'm feeling pretty stupid right now.

I've created a text item called test1, and typed in the words "Mickey Mouse" (withouth the quotes) as the only words on the text entry.

Then I go to do a new search, and type in "Mickey Mouse", and get 0 hits. If I just search for mouse, I get the proper result, but not for the phrase search.

I did switch to the advanced view, and it did come up with (Item) matches wildcard *Mickey Mouse*, but still no hits.

I am using 1.1 as well. Am I just terminally stupid or what?

[xja]

Actually I believe you found a bug, so maybe you aren't so stupid. Either that or I am also.

Using quotes seems to work when the text you are searching for is in the title (the way I was testing it), but it does NOT work when the text you are searching for is in the Item Details section (the way you tested it above) or in the Item Notes attribute... maybe other Attributes, I haven't tried the others.

[kevina]

Ultra Recall parses the main content of an Info Item (either the document or the rich text for most others [excluding the Contacts template and those derived from it]) for keywords but the entire text is not stored as plain text. Ultra Recall was designed this way as the best tradeoff between search performance, space and time efficiency and as a way to avoid ever having a stale index (that needs to be periodically rebuilt).

In other words true "phrase searching" is only available for the text assigned to String Attributes of an Info Item but not the assigned keywords. We are investigating technology that would allow efficient phrase indexing that would keep all updates atomic (all or nothing with an index that is always current - the way Ultra Recall currently works).

A couple options currently exist, you can search for phrases in the title or other string attributes, or you can add common search phrases as a "keyword", then enter the phrase to search for with double-quotes as previously mentioned in the thread.

[Sean Siler]

Thanks for the info. At least I know it's not me.

[dasymington]

Originally posted by kevina
A couple options currently exist, you can search for phrases in the title or other string attributes, or you can add common search phrases as a "keyword", then enter the phrase to search for with double-quotes as previously mentioned in the thread.

The help file says you can "Enter a criteria of Item Text Matches Wildcard *phrase to search*". Does that mean you now should be able to do phrase searching on the contents of Info Items rather than just their attributes?

It doesn't seem to be working here. I have several items with the phrase "request for change" in them and a search on item matches wildcard *request for change* doesn't find anything. I've checked the keywords for items it should find and request, for and change are all present.

Dave

[kinook]

Correct, v1.3 added phrase search capabilities. Make sure to select Item Text, not (Item) in the Item/Attribute column of the Advanced search.

[dasymington]

I wasn't using Item Text, but now I have. The helpfile warns that it can be very slow, but it seems like it's not going to get there at all: restricting the search to an imported items folder that contains 30 Word files (mainly one or two page letters), it's still running after half an hour and the CPU usage is at 50%. I've tried closing UR and restarting it, but it still hasn't found anything yet.

Would you expect it to be that slow?

[kinook]

The time will be dependent on the amount and size of items and documents in your database. How large is your database? How many documents are in it?

Another option might be to do a limited Quick Search for 'request for change'. This will find all items containing all 3 keywords. Or to limit it further, an advanced search on (Item) contains keywords 'request for change' and URL matches wildcard *.doc, etc.

[dasymington]

The database is 612 Mb and containes 16,763 items, but I limited the search to the folder in bold in the Data Explorer, which only contains 30 Word files.