Question

Repro:

1. Type "google group" (without quotes) into the search box.
2. SE will look for the word "group" within questions tagged "google" even though "google" was not put in square brackets.

Another example is "add tags". The search engine will interpret this as "add [tags]".

Why this is bad:

• It's unexpected behavior. Users expect a search box to do full-text search, not tag browsing.
• It prevents the user from finding useful answers because it will not find the word "google" in posts that aren't tagged [google]. For example, I couldn't find the name of the Google Group for SE users.
• There is no mention of this behavior in the help box for search. The workaround (put the word in quotes) is not documented either.

What it should do is search in both the tags and the question/answer text.

Answer 1

The search works on filtering out based on tags for the search words it finds that also happen to be in something like the top 40 of the tags.

So for this:

add tags

tags is spotted in the top tier and automatically switches it out for the tag.

You can work around that right now by putting it in quotes, like so:

add "tags"

Answer 2

Yes, Jeff has talked about the search algorithm they use. Pretty sure it does something like this:

• Check the results of a full text search
• treat the individual tokens as [tags]
• if tags are found, search for text within the tag