We have noticed that in our advanced search screen, when we restrict to searching the text field, we never see any hits, despite the fact that we have numerous documents with text capture data in our system. I’ve tried searching for numerous words and phrases I know exist in the text field of items and no joy. Any idea on why this might be happening?
My first guess would be to go to the search settings on the admin side, make sure everything you want indexed is checked, and redo the indexing.
There are some quirks to MYSQL’s indexing, though. For example, short words, or words that appear in more than half the records are usually ignored by default.
Already tried that. I know the documents are indexed, they show up in simple search. Advanced search does not seem to search the text capture at all. it doesn’t matter what I search on, I get zero hits.
Could you clarify what you mean by the ‘text field’? Is it the Dublin Core ‘Text’ field, or something else from Item Type Metadata? Also, is the text entered into one of those metadata fields, or do you have something like items with PDFs as the files attached?
I think I’ve figured out the problem-advanced search says it searches “items only,” but our text capture data is deposited at the file metadata level. If the advanced search is only looking at item level metadata, then it wouldn’t retrieve anything that’s full-text from our collection. Is there any way to get the advanced search to search this field at the file level? Would it search the text if we moved it to the item level?
Yep, that’s what I was starting to suspect. The advanced search won’t get to the File data, but if you moved/copied the text onto the item level the advanced search would pick them up.