I have read several of the old posts about doing a simple search with Omeka not returning any results. I am having this problem too. I will have a item with the Title, Subject, Description, and Creator filled out, but nothing will return when I search it. If I select Boolean then I get a result back, but I as Keyword is set to the default, I imagine that is what most of my users are going to do.
My question is why is the default set to keyword, when it doesn't return any results, and my second questions is there a way to set the default to Boolean? But the only problem with setting the default to that is if my Item name is 'States" and they search 'State' nothing will return.
Is there anyway to fix the keyword search so that I works?
I also don't fully understand why the advanced keyword search works but the basic one doesn't.
Edit seemed to go away =\
Also I noted my URL displays
http://192.168.47.21/search?query=penguin&query_type=keyword&record_types%5B%5D=Item&record_types%5B%5D=File&record_types%5B%5D=Collection
But when I look at a functioning Omeka site that works, it looks different. Specifically the end of the URL, which shows =Search
I am beyond confused right now.
What kinds of searches are and are not working for you?
There are some MySQL default restrictions on stopwords and short words, but this doesn't sound like what you're encountering.
Well, when I search for an item and I search for the name, subject, or creator, the item that I know is there doesn't show up. If I search it in the Advanced search, it comes up.
Here is the link to my site. http://168.61.36.8/
Try search for the New Mexico picture. Nothing will come up.
Ah, I think this is the third of the default MySQL search's little quirks.
By default, it's set up to only respect search terms that appear in less than 50% of the index. The idea is to avoid a huge amount of useless results for common words.
On a normal set of data, this is basically unnoticeable most of the time, but one scenario where you definitely will see it is when there's a really low number of things in the index, like 1 or 2.
With that low a number of documents, essentially every string is guaranteed to appear in 50% or more of the documents, and nothing gets returned.
Simply adding a few more items or files should resolve this.
Okay, I am going to import a larger amount of data later and get back with you.
Thanks for your help.
edit: So that worked, but if I have a random record in there that doesn't really match up with any of my other records, is that record out of luck?
Being highly different and not matching up with anything else would make it more likely to come up in searches for those uncommon terms.
It's only terms that are extremely common, that appear in nearly all your items, that could run up against this restriction.
Ah okay, thanks.
I am importing my real data in the next few weeks so hopefully it works with that. If anything, this works well enough for the simple search.
Thanks for your help again John.
I am having a similar problem with simple searches. I am new to the admin. side of Omeka, but going through my hosting service I was able to install 2.0.; however I am not able to do a simple search in 2.0 (or 1.5. I have checked all the search avenues: item, file, etc. However, when I clicked index records I get an error message that says go to codex to retrieve message. I entered all of my items under 1.5 originally, but I was not aware of the search settings feature at the time, so they were not indexed for searches. Is this the problem?
Try indexing in 2.0. You may also have the MySQL error that I have.
Thanks, CJ.
I created subject terms in the subject field for a couple of my items and those are now coming up in a simple search, except for a couple of terms that are so common to my site that I guess there are too many hits, although I do not get a message saying that that is the case. I have been trying to index in 2.0, but I keep getting an error message. If I was able to "index" successfully, should I be seeing anything different? Does indexing make a difference for simple searches? Like I said, I am rather new to Omeka.Thank You, RBM
Indexing did nothing for me. What was the error? Try using a different browser when indexing.
It does not ell me what the error is. I guess I have to take out some code, specifically "#" in order to view error messages? I am using Firefox, but I can try IE. Thanks again.