Full text search not matching correctly
Paweł Z.
Issue is still active
Keith Scheiwiller
My tests of Full Text search have shown very hit or miss results. I'll pick out a keyword I know exists in an existing bookmark (old enough to have been archived) and it picks it up maybe 20% of the time.
Full-text search is obviously not easy to implement (I think raindrop is one of the few to even offer it!) but maybe some information on how raindrop performs the search could at least make things a little clearer. For example, does raindrop only store keywords it decides are important? Or is the full HTML searched?
Rustem Mussabekov
Keith Scheiwiller: Usually only meaningful content of web-page is indexed. Ads, navigation, comments and so on are stripped if possible. https://help.raindrop.io/using-search#full-text-search
In other words you can't find keywords from site footer for example, etc.
Can you give exact examples? The keywords and web-pages that are not possible to find by using full-text search. This will help a lot on debugging the situation
Keith Scheiwiller
Rustem Mussabekov: Thanks for the quick reply! Just to be clear, searching in raindrop is still great. It covers most "normal" use-cases (things in the title, tags, description). But full-text would really set it apart!
Anyway, here's a few examples of webpages and search terms, ordered from more "normal" sites to more niche. Happy to pull up more examples if needed! Thanks!
zombies
numpy
Spacebot
Kalphites
Rustem Mussabekov
Keith Scheiwiller: I tested on my own, and only last one is not working, due to we can't make a permanent copy of it. I will investigate this bug later.
Check attached screenshots, all other links have full-text search.
Be sure that full-text search start working only when permanent copy is available. This requires sometime to generate.
Keith Scheiwiller
Rustem Mussabekov: Thanks for looking into this so quickly! I was poking around on this further earlier this week. I was rather confused why I wasn't getting any results like you were when some of those links are as far back as 2016. However it looks like there was either an update or some sort of backfill, and now all the above searches are working, including the last! Awesome, thank you!
K
Kartik Vempala
Rustem Mussabekov: I'm having a similar problem.
None of the news.ycombinator.com links seem to be indexed :( They constitute around 25% of all my bookmarks! For instance, I have bookmarked this page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29971470 ) , and it has the word "pedagocical" in it, but when I perform a search for that word, the search results are empty :(
The conversations on news.ycombinator.com are extremely valuable, and are the main reason I save those links, but they are for some reason not being indexed at all :(
Is there some blacklist or heuristic maybe that is blocking them? Any help would be greatly greatly appreciated!! Thank you!
Dev Ramdin
I'm having a similar issue with partial text not being matched in a permanent copy.
t
thakichow
This has been the case for me as well. I also have a pro account with Pocket that I'm testing against raindrop and Pocket's full-text search seems to be working better.
I use this feature to search through technical docs, github issues, and stackoverflow posts and is the major feature for me so would love better matches. Thanks!