I noticed that a search for multiple "pattern people watch however go the pattern" (for example) returns 1 result (which is nonsense — it should be 0) but removing the first word returns 0 results (as expected). Moving the unquoted word to the end also returns 0 results.
Another example: please "fix it fix it fix it fix the search": 90 results. Without first word: 0 results.
A key part here is that the searches above should not return any results. Searches which do match posts don't display a bug like this.
The current behavior isn't helpful. I'm not told that what I typed in doesn't have any results (but maybe it used to?) and it's incredibly confusing to see so many results and check them and not find what the search was supposed to find (the exact quoted text).
From a previous bug report I had these tag searches:
- Coffee:
[caffeine] "dark light"and without tag - Science Fiction and Fantasy:
[movie] "potter and harry"and without tag. (Note that none of the posts that show up in the second search should turn up in the tag search) - スタック・オーバーフロー (Japanese SO):
[php] "controller default"and without tag
The behavior I initially reported there (added quotes) was fixed according to Yaakov:
Part of the internal workings of search is that in some cases where the initial terms return zero results, it will perform a variant search using the same terms (but surrounded by quotes). This variant search ended up leaking back into the UI in a confusing way. No longer an issue.
But the tag searches still returned results when they shouldn't. When I asked about why they returned results:
The results shown when searching for [the Coffee SE search] are the result of the variant search that I referred to. Must have missed the title, will get to that soon, thanks.
Still, I think it should be fixed.
