We did our test with 中國翻譯 (Chinese Translators Journal) which have two words highly present in our Catalog: China and translation.

First, the default Koha behaviour is to add a "*" at the end of the searched word, which lead to 0 results. It produces a query looking like this one:

$ curl  "http://localhost:9200/koha_robin_biblios/_search?pretty" -d '{"from": 0, "size": 0,"query":{"query_string":{"query": "中國翻譯*"}}}'
{
  "took" : 1,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 5,
    "successful" : 5,
    "skipped" : 0,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : 0,
    "max_score" : 0.0,
    "hits" : [ ]
  }
}

If we quote 中國翻譯 in Koha, it yields one answer, the right one. It produces a query looking like this one:

$ curl  "http://bouse02.prive.bulac.fr:9200/koha_robin_biblios/_search?pretty" -d '{"from": 0, "size": 0,"query":{"query_string":{"query": "\"中國翻譯\""}}}'
{
  "took" : 5,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 5,
    "successful" : 5,
    "skipped" : 0,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : 1,
    "max_score" : 0.0,
    "hits" : [ ]
  }
}

Note that if I write an Elasticsearch query without quotes or star, it yields too much results (9626), the “right” result isn't in the ten first results:

$ curl  "http://bouse02.prive.bulac.fr:9200/koha_robin_biblios/_search?pretty" -d '{"from": 0, "size": 0,"query":{"query_string":{"query": "中國翻譯"}}}'
{
  "took" : 16,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 5,
    "successful" : 5,
    "skipped" : 0,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : 9626,
    "max_score" : 0.0,
    "hits" : [ ]
  }
}


I'm not sure what the right behaviour needs to be. We felt adding quotes added a lot of relevance to our results no matter what the language is. What is certain is that adding a star to the search by default doesn't help us. We didn't have the problem with Elasticsearch while playing with it in 17.05. For us, it is a regression. I add the MARC of our test record.

What do you think about it?

Best regards,

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