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NOTE: it seems Meta Stack Exchange blocks posts with Korean characters so I have reformulated this question using only English. You can view the actual question on Korean language meta here.

Let's take searching for this question as an example

If I search for "Guem su hoe i rok", Guem su hoe i rok, hoe i rok, I get a 0 results page.

It's not like the search is ignoring non English characters either, because searching for something generic like Na neun gives a lot of results

I know that one of the answers contains the phrase minutes from a meeting of animals, so searching for minutes from a or meeting of animals brings up the post (although searching minutefrom a doesn't bring it up, so it seems the search engine cannot make a relationship between singular and plural of the same English word, but I suppose that is a problem for a different question)

So what is going on regarding non English character searches? Do the search results improve based on more number of people searching for the same stuff? Is the search just limited this way, when it comes to non English characters? By the way, searching on google for Guem su hoe i rok stackexchange brings out this post as the first result. Please answer here or at Korean Language Stack Exchange meta.

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  • The title is correct, but it is a little bit confusing when it is about something that is not working as expected or required.
    – P.Mort. - forgot Clay Shirky_q
    Dec 29 '20 at 16:04
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Stack Exchange search is powered by Elasticsearch and it uses so-called stemmers for indexing and searching. They enable e.g. that when you search for 'problems', you get search results containing 'problem' too (but not vice versa). Stack Exchange seems to use the same stemmer for all sites, and the bad news is that it's optimized for English only. What it does exactly to words from non-Latin alphabets, I don't know. I've tried a few searches with Russian words on the Russian Stack Overflow site and they seem to work pretty well (though they don't benefit from the stemming).

Does the search results improve based on more number of people searching for the same stuff?

In any case, searching more often doesn't help. Posting on Meta might help, but feature requests like this one, while popular, didn't get an official response yet. A workaround is to use Google (or another search engine) with the site:korean.stackexchange.com option. External search engines often give better results than Stack Exchange search anyway...

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  • do you have any idea on why it didn't show me any search results when searching for "minute from a", when "minutes from a" exists?
    – user13267
    Dec 24 '20 at 10:17
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    Sorry, I was wrong, the stemmer only works one way (searching for 'minutes' gives results with 'minute' as well, but not the other way around).
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Dec 24 '20 at 10:22

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