I am trying to produce a tagging system for a recruitment agency model and love the way SO separates tags and searches for the remaining phrases.
How would you compare the tags in a table to the search query etc...
I have come up with the following but it has some hickups...
User enters search query
Full text SQL contains() search on tbl_tags
Returns 5 results
Check if each "exact tag phrase" exists in original query string.
If it does exist then add tagID to array.
Remove tag names from original search string...
Search in tbl_people for people with linked TagIDs and search text fields with remaining text.
Example search : French Project Managers with Oracle experience
Tags : [French] [Project Manager]s with [Oracle] experience
Remaining text : s with experience
Now the problem comes when I search for Project Managers it leaves me with a surplus "s"... and there are probably other bugs with this logic too that I cannot account for...
Any ideas on how to make the logic perfect?
Thanks in advance, I understand this might be a bit of an abstract question...
You're missing a key ingredient of how StackOverflow does its search. SO requires that the user delineate the tags in the search string by explicitly putting brackets around the tags. The (probably simplified) logic would then be.
Extract marked tags using regex to detect contents inside brackets
Using list of most common tags, scan string for unmarked tags and extract them.
Remove tag meta characters
Perform full-text search, filtered by tags
Related
I feel we can improve the search results from our help site (tested few terms and not seeing relevant results on the first page) and I am exploring our options.
We use Apache Solr Search and after reading around it seems like we can improve the results by tweaking the Field Bias. Here is the list of the field available. Some of the fields are self-explanatory but I do not know what others mean. For eg. Path alias, tm_vid_2_names, etc .
The full, rendered content (e.g. the rendered node body)
Title or label
Path alias
Body text inside links (A tags)
Body text inside H1 tags
Body text inside H2 or H3 tags
Body text inside H4, H5, or H6 tags
Body text in inline tags like EM or STRONG
All taxonomy term names
tm_ds_search_result
tm_vid_11_names
tm_vid_12_names
tm_vid_16_names
Taxonomy term names only from the Tags vocabulary
tm_vid_21_names
tm_vid_26_names
tm_vid_2_names
tm_vid_3_names
tm_vid_4_names
tm_vid_5_names
tm_vid_6_names
tm_vid_9_names
Extra rendered content or keywords
Author name
Author name (Formatted)
The rendered comments associated with a node
Thank you very much for your help.
It's impossible to say what the meaning behind all those fields are without knowing your domain and what is actually relevant information. I'd start by actually looking at how people are using your search, and what they're searching for - and then start tweaking how much to boost each field to get more relevant results than what you're seeing now.
If you're using the dismax or edismax query handlers (which you probably are), you can tweak the weights and boosts of each field by applying weights in the list of fields to query: qf=field^10 field_2^5 field_3. This would search all three fields, but give more weight to hits in the first field than the second and third.
In your case you'd probably want to give more boost to anything in the title, h1, h2, h3, etc. fields, as they're probably better descriptors of the content, as well as the taxonomy fields. The body field shouldn't be considered very important (so no boost is probably a good start), except to make sure that you're finding the document if it's a rarely used term.
You can append debugQuery=true to your query to see exactly how the results are scored and why a certain document ranked above another in the search results.
It's impossible for anyone without specific knowledge of your data and search patterns to say anything exact about which fields to include and their weights.
My title sounds complicated, but the situation is very simple. People search on my site using a term such as "blackfriday".
When they conduct the search, my SQL code needs to look in various places such as a ProductTitle and ProductDescription field to find this term. For example:
SELECT *
FROM dbo.Products
WHERE ProductTitle LIKE '%blackfriday%' OR
ProductDescription LIKE '%blackfriday%'
However, the term appears differently in the database fields. It is most like to appear with a space between the words as such "Black Friday USA 2015". So without going through and adding more combinations to the WHERE clause such as WHERE ProductTitle LIKE '%Black-Friday%', is there a better way to accomplish this kind of fuzzy searching?
I have full-text search enabled on the above fields but its really not that good when I use the CONTAINS clause. And of course other terms may not be as neat as this example.
I should start by saying that "variations (of a string)" is a bit vague. You could mean plurality, verb tenses, synonyms, and/or combined words (or, ignoring spaces and punctuation between 2 words) like the example you posted: "blackfriday" vs. "black friday" vs "black-friday". I have a few solutions of which 1 or more together may work for you depending on your use case.
Ignoring punctuation
Full Text searches already ignore punctuation and match them to spaces. So black-friday will match black friday whether using FREETEXT or CONTAINS. But it won't match blackfriday.
Synonyms and combined words
Using FREETEXT or FREETEXTTABLE for your full text search is a good way to handle synonyms and some matching of combined words (I don't know which ones). You can customize the thesaurus to add more combined words assuming it's practical for you to come up with such a list.
Handling combinations of any 2 words
Maybe your use case calls for you to match poorly formatted text or hashtags. In that case I have a couple of ideas:
Write the full text query to cover each combination of words using a dictionary. For example your data layer can rewrite a search for black friday as CONTAINS(*, '"black friday" OR "blackfriday"'). This may have to get complex, for example would black friday treehouse have to be ("black friday" OR "blackfriday") AND ("treehouse" OR "tree house")? You would need a dictionary to figure out that "treehouse" is made up of 2 words and thus can be split.
If it's not practical to use a dictionary for the words being searched for (I don't know why, maybe acronyms or new memes) you could create a long query to cover every letter combination. So searching for do-re-mi could be "do re mi" OR "doremi" OR "do remi" OR "dore mi" OR "d oremi" OR "d o remi" .... Yes it will be a lot of combinations, but surprisingly it may run quickly because of how full text efficiently looks up words in the index.
A hack / workaround if searching for multiple variations is very important.
Define which fields in the DB are searchable (e.g ProductTitle, ProductDescription)
Before saving these fields in the DB, replace each space (or consecutive spaces by a placeholder e.g "%")
Search the DB for variation matches employing the placeholder
Do the reverse process when displaying these fields on your site (i.e replace placeholder with space)
Alternatively you can enable regex matching for your users (meaning they can define a regex either explicitly or let your app build one from their search term). But it is slower and probably error-prone to do it this way
After looking into everything, I have settled for using SQL's FREETEXT full-text search. Its not ideal, or accurate, but for now it will have to do.
My answer is probably inadequate but do you have any scenarios which wont be addressed by query below.
SELECT *
FROM dbo.Products
WHERE ProductTitle LIKE '%black%friday%' OR
ProductDescription LIKE '%black%friday%'
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.
Lets use emails for an example as a document. You have your subject, body, the person who its from and lets say we can also tag them (as gmail does)
From my understanding of QueryParser i give it ONE field and the parser type. If a user enter text the user only searches whatever i set. I notice it will look in the subject or body field if i wrote fieldName: text to search however how do i make a regular query such as "funny SO question unicorn" find result(s) with some of those strings in the subject, the others in the body? ATM because i knew it would be easy i made a field called ALL and combined all the other fields into that but i would like to know how i can do it in a proper way. Especially since my next app is text search dependent
Use MultiFieldQueryParser. You can specify list of fields to be searched using following constructor.
MultiFieldQueryParser(Version matchVersion, String[] fields, Analyzer analyzer)
This will generate a query as if you have created multiple queries on different fields. This partially addresses your problem. This, still, will not match one term matching in field1 and another matching in field2. For this, as you have rightly pointed out, you will need to combine all the fields in one single field and search in that field. Nevertheless, you will find MultiFieldQueryParser useful when query terms do not cross the field boundaries.
AJAX autocomplete is fairly simple to implement. However, I wonder how to handle smart tag suggestion like this on SO.
To clarify the difference between autocomplete and suggestion:
autocomplete: foo [foobar, foobaz]
suggestion: foo [barfoo, foobar, foobaz], or even better, with 'did you mean' feature: [barfoo, foobar, foobaz, fobar, fobaz]
I suppose I need some full text search in tags (all letters indexed, not just words). There would be no problem to do it witch regex or other patterns for limited number of tags (even client side).
But how to implement this feature for big number of tags?
Is there any particular reason (besides URL) the tags on SO are dash separated? What about Unicode characters in tags?
I store the tags in the table with the following columns: id, tagname.
My SQL query returns objects with following fields: id, tagname, count
(I use Doctrine ORM and pgsql as default db driver.)
I would go with SELECTING them from database by REGEXP at every keypress. I did this on my sites and the was no prefrormance problem (I do not have heavy loaded server thought). If you do not like this idea, I would cash all 1-5 letters combinations which will users enter and refresh them on daily basis in separate table. If this table is indexed than you have very fast implementation.
To elaborate more on the second appreach:
Briefly: 1. Make a table SEARCHTABLE representing 1-n relationship betwean keywords (limit it to 3-4 letters) and primary IDs of tags. 2. INDEX on both fields. 3. Everytime the user makes a search do look at the SEARCHTABLE and if the combination is there, use that - very fast, as everything is indexed. If not do the regexp search and put all results to SEARCHTABLE.
Notes:
You should invalidate the table if
you add tags, but this should much
less often than a search. When
invalidating table you do not
necesarilly TRUNCATE it, you can
easily rebuild it taking all
keywords into account.
If you want to speed it up, you can "pregenerate" all two or even three
letters searches.
If you care enough, you should be using information from n-1 letter kewords to generate
the n letter keyword. It speeds the things tremendously. Imagine that user has typed "mo"
and you have shown them appropriate result from SEARCHTABLE. Than when she types "n"
giving it "mon" you need only serach trough already selected items to generate new
response.
Hope it is more comprehensive now.