Cloudant Search: Why are my wildcards not working? - lucene

I have a Cloudant database with a search index. In the search index I index the titles of my documents. For instance, search for 'rijkspersoneel':
http://wetten.cloudant.com/regelingen/_design/RegelingInfo/_search/regeling?q=title:rijkspersoneel
Returns 48 rows.
However, when I replace the 'o' with a ? wildcard:
http://wetten.cloudant.com/regelingen/_design/RegelingInfo/_search/regeling?q=title:rijkspers?neel
I get 0 results. Why is that? The Cloudant docs say that this should match 'rijkspersoneel' as well!

My previous answer was definitely mistaken. Internal wildcads do appear to be supported. Try:
title:rijkspe*on*
title rijksper?on*
Fairly sure what is happening here is an analysis issue. Fairly sure you are using a stemming analyzer. I'm not really all the familiar with cloudant and their implementation of this, but in Lucene, wildcard queries are not subject to the same analysis as term queries. I'm guessing that your analysis of this field includes a stemmer, in which case "rijkspersoneel" is actually indexed as "rijkspersone".
So, when you search for
rijkspersonee*
or
rijkper?oneel
Since the "el" is missing from the end in the indexed form, you find no matches. When just searching for rijkpersoneel it does get analyzed though, and you search for the stemmed form of the word, and will find matches.
Stemming and wildcards just don't get along.

Related

SQL Server Efficient Search for LIKE '%str%'

In Sql Server, I have a table containing 46 million rows.
In "Title" column of table, I want make search. The word may be at any index of field value.
For example:
Value in table: BROTHERS COMPANY
Search string: ROTHER
I want this search to match the given record. This is exactly what LIKE '%ROTHER%' do. However, LIKE '%%' usage should not be used on large tables because of performance issues. How can I achieve it?
Though I don't know your requirements, your best approach may be to challenge them. Middle-of-the-string searches are usually not very practical. If you can get your users to perform prefix searches (broth%) then you can easily use Full Text's wildcard search (CONTAINS(*, '"broth*"')). Full Text can also handle suffix searches (%rothers) with a little extra work.
But when it comes to middle-of-the-string searches with SQL Server, you're stuck using LIKE. However you may be able to improve performance of LIKE by using a binary collation as explained in this article. (I hate to post a link without including its content but it is way too long of an article to post here and I don't understand the approach enough to sum it up.)
If that doesn't help and if middle-of-the-string searches are that important of a requirement then you should consider using a different search solution like Lucene.
Add Full-Text index if you want.
You can search the table using CONTAINS:
SELECT *
FROM YourTable
WHERE CONTAINS(TableColumnName, 'SearchItem')

SQL like '%term%' except without letters

I'm searching against a table of news articles. The 2 relevant columns are ArticleTitle and ArticleText. When I want to search an article for a particular term, i started out with
column LIKE '%term%'.
However that gave me a lot of articles with the term inside anchor links, for example <a href="example.com/*term*> which would potentially return an irrelevant article.
So then I switched to
column LIKE '% term %'.
The problem with this query is it didn't find articles who's title or text began/ended with the term. Also it didn't match against things like term- or term's, which I do want.
It seems like the query i want should be able to do something like this
'%[^a-z]term[^a-z]%
This should exclude terms within anchor links, but everything else. I think this query still excludes strings that begin/end with the term. Is there a better solution? Does SQL-Server's FULL TEXT INDEXING solve this problem?
Additionally, would it be a good idea to store ArticleTitle and ArticleText as HTML-free columns? Then i could use '%term%' without getting anchor links. These would be 2 extra columns though, because eventually i will need the original HTML for formatting purposes.
Thanks.
SQL Server's LIKE allows you to define Regex-like patterns like you described.
A better option is to use fulltext search:
WHERE CONTAINS(ArticleTitle, 'term')
exploits the index properly (the LIKE '%term%' query is slow), and provides other benefit in the search algorithm.
Additionally, you might benefit from storing a plaintext version of the article alongside the HTML version, and run your search queries on it.
SQL is not designed to interpret HTML strings. As such, you'd only be able to postpone the problem till a more difficult issue arrives (for example, a comment node that contains your search terms as part of a plain sentence).
You can still utilize FULL TEXT as a prefilter and then run an HTML analysis on the application layer to further filter your result set.

Searching "AND" in lucene index

I have lucene indexes indexed using StandardAnalyzer. The index consist of a value "AND".
When I try to search for the field value AND using MultiFieldQueryParser, the search is resulting in error.
EG: field1:* AND field2:AND
filed1:* AND field:"AND"
I have tried escape but is that is escaping the field value. I have aslo tried in double coutes("AND"). But could not succed in getting correct value.
Any advice in this regard would be helpful.
Thanks in advance.
I suspect that there are probably two issues in play here:
Query syntax, I think you'll get further by putting the "and" in lower case. Boolean terms in the standard query parser must be in upper case. Anyway, given that one of the steps of the standard analyser is to drop case sensitivity, this shouldn't be an issue
The next problem is stop words: I suspect that "and" is excluded from the set of analysed terms by the standard analysers stop word list. You could get around this by using a different stop word list with the standard analyser that doesn't exclude "and" as a term.
Good luck,

How to find href=blah but not href=/blah with Full-text search

I'm currently using the query
SELECT Url FROM Link WHERE CONTAINS(Url, 'href=blah')
It is including results with href=/blah. Any way I can tell the query to act more like WHERE Url LIKE '%href=blah%' and still use the full-text catalog?
Your problem is that = and / are both word breakers, in other words, sql fulltext is actually searching for href and blah
There are a couple of options you could try. First you could filter down the search domain using the fulltext engine, then search the subset of data using LIKE. You'll need to experiment to see how to squeeze out the best performance.
The other option is, if href=blah is a consistent term you could add that to a custom dictionary. A good article on this is here.

not query in lucene

i need to do not queries on my lucene index. Lucene currently allows not only when we have two or more terms in the query:
So I can do something like:
country:canada not sweden
but I can't run a query like:
country:not sweden
Could you please let me know if there is some efficient solution for this problem
Thanks
A very late reply, but it might be useful for somebody else later:
*:* AND NOT country:sweden
IF I'm not mistaken this should do a logical "AND" with all documents and the documents with a country that is different from "sweden".
Try with the following query in the search box:
NOT message:"warning"
message being the search field
Please check answer for similar question. The solution is to use MatchAllDocsQuery.
The short answer is that this is not possible using the standard Lucene.
Lucene does not allow NOT queries as a single term for the same reason it does not allow prefix queries - to perform either, the engine would have to look through each document to ascertain whether the document is/is not a hit. It has to look through each document because it cannot use the search term as the key to look up documents in the inverted index (used to store the indexed documents).
To take your case as an example:
To search for not sweden, the simplest (and possibly most efficient) approach would be to search for sweden and then "invert" the result set to return all documents that are not in that result set. Doing this would require finding all the required (ie. not in the result set) documents in the index, but without a key to look them up by. This would be done by iterating over the documents in the index - a task it is not optimised for, and hence speed would suffer.
If you really need this functionality, you could maintain your own list of items when indexing, so that a not sweden search becomes a sweden search using Lucene, followed by an inversion of the results using your set of items.
OK, I see what you are trying to do.
You can use it as a query refinement since there are no unary Boolean operators in Lucene. Despite the answers above, I believe this is a better and most forward approach (note the space before the wildcard):
&query= *&qf=-country:Canada