I'm building a site featuring letters by and to Franz Boas, an American anthropologist. When I search, I'm able to find every word I choose for tags, subject, titles EXCEPT "Franz" and "Boas".
I can find these when I use the advanced search only -- but nothing else (including searches from the publicly viewed pages.) Caps, lower case, re-entering, including ONLY the word "Boas" in subject -- nothing seems to work.
Since the collection is ABOUT Franz Boas, this is problematic. I'm very new at OMEKA, but IT here at Guelph University familiar with this program also couldn't figure it out.
If I change his name (in the title or subject entries) to "Frank" "Boat" --- using the exact same content otherwise -- my searches are successful. But "Franz" and "Boas" just won't show up.
If I remember right, this is a quirk of MySQL search settings. If the same keyword is indexed a lot, MySQL's search decides it is a stop-word (like 'and') and ignores it.
Ahhhh --- interesting. And that seems to be the answer! Thanks very much.
Actually, on second thought, I'm not sure this is the total answer. I'm thinking of exhibits which include the same search word hundreds of times -- in subject, in titles, in exhibit titles, in collection titles (as opposed to the 5 or 6 times I've used "Franz" and "Boas" in my little prototype site. Hm...... Still thinking about this.
The trick is that terms get dropped based on how likely they are to appear in items as a percentage of the whole. MySQL considers terms that appear in over 50% of indexed items to be so common that it excludes them from keyword searches.
You can really easily see this problem when you have a very small number of items: with 1 item, all terms appear in 100% of documents, so you can't search for anything.
The "boolean" search mode for the sitewide search shouldn't apply that 50% filter and will likely give better results here.
Many thanks!! Now -- to see if this is robust enough for about 8-10K entries! I appreciate your very quick and very clear explanation.
Is there any way to change the mysql settings? I think I am hitting this issue still.