[Koha-devel] searching for phrases

[Nicole Engard]

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Galen Charlton <gmcharlt at gmail.com> wrote:
> In a perfect world, I agree that it would be best to settle on one
> search engine and eliminate an installation option, but I don't think
> that we'll ever get there; there will always be another external
> engine that is newer/faster/shinier/better-supported than whatever
> Koha uses at the time.  It's also important to identify the source of
> the problem - in the case of phrase searching, Zebra is perfectly
> capable of doing it, but there are a number of flaws in C4::Search's
> notion of query parsing that stand in the way and that would still
> apply if we ripped out Zebra and replaced it with Solr.
>
> Refactoring C4::Search in 3.4 will get us most of the way, and doing
> so with the idea of supporting Solr would keep us honest as we
> redesign the API.  However, I would be quite content if the end result
> for 3.4 was simply a cleaner front end to Zebra.


Correct me if I'm wrong- but I've been told that Zebra is the reason
the facets work the way they do - and there are issues there as well.
I don't find the only issue with Zebra to be phrase searching, but
also boolean searches, the ordering of the facets, the inability to
show the number of hits next to facets or order them in alpha order
... and maybe even more I'm forgetting now.

But I do agree that there will be problems no matter what - or maybe
not problems but challenges - this is the nature of technology.

Nicole