[Koha-devel] searching for phrases

[Chris Cormack]

On 2 March 2010 09:57, Nicole Engard <nengard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
You are wrong :)

The problems are with how we are using Zebra, (which if we want to
blame someone other than who wrote C4::Search we could blame on the
zebra docs I guess)
I have no intention of tossing Zebra out and replacing it totally with
Solr, but being able to support both (and more potentially like
xapian) is a major goal of the rewrite of C4::Search.

Zebra is sometimes hard to figure out, but it is fast, and it pretty
much just works

Chris