[sword-devel] search oddities

[Karl Kleinpaste]

This is mostly for Troy, if he's keeping track. We had some discussion 
about this last April, but no resolution came of it.

I'm experimenting with some searches because results in Xiphos are 
peculiarly inconsistent. I realized I can demonstrate what I see wrong 
by use of diatheke alone.

I want to look for "prophetess." Minor variations in search term 
determine whether it's successful or not. A plain search for the word 
works fine:

diatheke -b NET -s lucene -k prophetess
Entries containing "prophetess"-- Judges 4:4Exodus 15:20 ; Nehemiah 6:14 
; Isaiah 8:3 ; Luke 2:36 ; Revelation of John 2:20 ; II Kings 22:14 ; II 
Chronicles 34:22 ;  -- 8 matches total (NET)

If I precede the word with '+', the search goes dark.

diatheke -b NET -s lucene -k +prophetess
Entries containing "+prophetess"-- none (NET)

But if I now insist on a space following as well as the preceding '+', 
now results are back.

diatheke -b NET -s lucene -k '+prophetess '
Entries containing "+prophetess "-- Judges 4:4Exodus 15:20 ; Nehemiah 
6:14 ; Isaiah 8:3 ; Luke 2:36 ; Revelation of John 2:20 ; II Kings 22:14 
; II Chronicles 34:22 ;  -- 8 matches total (NET)

Not all words have this problem. Searching for "Jesus" works no matter 
what I do, and in fact most words do. But there are words that are 
somehow lost to search if the ordinary Lucene syntax of a preceding '+' 
is applied, and then proper results are restored with an entirely 
arbitrarily following space. I have no discriminant for what words work 
vs fail.

The reason this matters to me is that Xiphos in simple sidebar search 
presumes an AND search by tearing apart the offered search terms and 
prefixing each with '+', whether or not there are multiple terms. This 
makes a search for "prophetess" fail. But if I tack on a space, it works 
again. In Xiphos advanced search, plain "prophetess" works fine.

There's clearly a funky bug lurking under the hood here.

Clues welcome.
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