We have an Omeka archive: http://crossroadsarchive.net/
We have 4000+ items and are adding about 1000/month. When I search for Fred Guenther I get 62 hits. When I search for Guenther I get 27. There are only 3 or 4 correct for the full name. This happens in advanced and simple search. Before I create a whole index to solve this problem I would like to know if I am just missing some technique.
The simple search's normal behavior is to treat every word in the query as optional, but hits that contain more words from the query are given higher relevance, and so appear higher in the results.
If you want to retrieve only items that contain your exact string, you could use the "contains" predicate of the advanced search.
John:
I'm feeling slow here. I can't find any documentation on the "contains" predicate on this site. When I look for Advanced Search I come to Omeka Demo | Advanced Search which goes to a 404. So where do I learn what these predicates are and how to use them?
Clicking the "Advanced Search" link on your homepage (underneath the search box) takes me to the Advanced Search page.
The "predicates" I mentioned are found in the section called "Narrow by Specific Fields". The first drop-down lets you pick a metadata element to search on, and the second lets you pick how you want to search.
So, you could pick Dublin Core Description for the first box, "contains" for the second box, and then put your search term in the text box. The "contains" and "does not contain" options search for the exact term you enter, without doing extra fancy processing like the simple search does.