I searched for user: accidentally and I got these results with 17 million results:
Is there some bug here?
Or is this a weird means to query all questions on Stack Overflow?
1 Answer
This is by design.
Your query matched every post that was made by a user. Very similar to searching with an empty string.
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@qwertynl - It used empty string. And every post's user searched contained at least one empty string.– Travis JNov 19, 2013 at 22:39
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@TravisJ except that
user:12doesn't matchuser:12345, so why shoulduser:match all users? Nov 19, 2013 at 23:02 -
@Manishearth: In either case, the search term is not especially meaningful.– user102937Nov 19, 2013 at 23:04
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@RobertHarvey Of course, just saying that it's a misportrayal of the engine. Not important anyway. Nov 19, 2013 at 23:07
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@Manishearth - You are correct that if it were a partial match then 12 would return as part of 12345.It must be some sort of default return all then? If you search for "" then you can see the same millions of matches.I wasn't trying to mis-portrait the engine, and my point of containing was conjecture.By observation it seemed that the empty string triggered the large response and so I made that connection. I will say that
user:travisalso returns all results. Perhaps when the user is not an int it falls back to string matching or just returns bulk.– Travis JNov 19, 2013 at 23:13
user:*?user:actually takes a numeric user id and nothing else (search foruser:foooruser:qwertynland see what happens). The search engine apparently ignores non-numeric (including empty) input and resolves the query into a full scan.