I have a database of roughly 11132 records. When I query it using the basic search I am having trouble finding a particular word that I know exists in the data. If I query the database via the advanced search then the results are way more than I expect. From what I have experienced so far, it seems that the basic search looks at the title field only. Is this the case? The unfiltered advanced search, on the other hand, seems to search the entire database. Is that true? Also, if a word occurs in all records, is it negated in the basic search? That is what seems to be happening but I don’t know why. Can you help me figure this out? Thank you.
It may depend on how the word appears in your site. MySQL considers terms that appear in over 50% of indexed items to be so common that it excludes them from keyword searches.
Oh! The particular term I am searching “hall” appears in the Title field (66 results) and in a field called Last Name (also 66 results since the Title field is a concatenation of the Last Name field and two other fields. It also appears in another field in a phrase common to all the records. Is there a way for me to exclude that field from the search (not index it) so that the term will be less common?
There isn’t really a way to do that, no.
What exactly is the problem you’re having with the advanced search? It should work fine for this (i.e., searching for your term in the Title element).
Hi John,
Megan answered the question and now I know that my only option is using the Advanced Search (Items only). That said, I can’t query the term “hall” when searching the Title field as that would give me Hall, Hallmark etc. if I limit my query to Title contains “hall.” Nor can I use Exact match with the Title field because the title is a combination of multiple fields, one of them being the last name. So now I know I can tell users that “hall” because of its frequency in the database, poses a special problem when searching and if they want to retrieve records for anyone with the last name “hall” they must use the Advanced Search (Items only) and limit it to the Last Name field.
Thank you both for all your help and attention to my question!