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Wrong / unrelated result to a search...

rholler

Member
Posts: 4

rholler @ 2023-04-14 13:16:27 UTC

I was doing a search this morning for the song "Mercy Walked In" (a song released by Gordon Mote), but the following completely-unrelated page keeps coming up...


Submission #31540


-Richard Holler

DashBoardDJ856

Member
Posts: 2483

DashBoardDJ856 @ 2023-04-14 14:54:31 UTC

Hey Richard,that appears to be one of SHS's fun quirks. If the song/any string of words that you type is not in the system, for some reason that page usually pops up or a list of FORUM DATABASE TOPICS pop up. My guess is that the system finds random words that you typed and you get that page, instead of saying Item Does Not Exist In SHS. I'm not sure how easy or hard that would be to program. Nor do I know the reasoning why those pages pop up. The managers Bastien or Mathieu might be able to help. That could also be an enhancement if it isn't too hard to program.

Anywho, if you check out Gordon Mote you can see that song isn't in the database for him. Now comes the fun part. Put on your detective hat and scour the internet to see if you can find the original and maybe a few more covers. I see you have already added an original and cover submissions to SHS, so at least you got that part under your belt.

I hope I helped a wee bit.

Good luck and keep on, keeping' on.

P.S. disclaimer - just to let you know, what I wrote is not the authorized answer, I'm just another Joe Shmoe in here, but at least someone answered you. Tongue

Last edit: 2023-04-14 15:02:51 UTC by DashBoardDJ856

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rholler

Member
Posts: 4

rholler @ 2023-04-14 15:43:53 UTC

Thanks for the information. I figured the answer was something weird like that. ;-)


I've already found that Mote released it in 2007. Now, the quest to find the original is on!


Thanks!

josephmurphy

Certified Contributor II
Posts: 49

josephmurphy @ 2023-04-14 15:51:28 UTC

In Boolean terms, it's probably doing an "AND" search instead of a phrase search. The words "Mercy" and "Walked" and "In" all appear on that page, so it isn't wrong. There's a useful distinction between "random words you typed" and "all of the words you typed, but not in order."


And frankly, I'd argue it's better to get those weird results than to have all searches like "satisfaction stones" fail, because (probably) those letters don't appear in that order in the database. And "satisfaction by the rolling stones" is a totally different pattern of letters.


The programming solution already exists; it's "use the detailed search" so you specify fields and don't get as many hits because somebody put the whole text of a song in the comments. (Though it does make me wonder if it would be useful to have an option to switch from keyword to phrase searching on the Detailed Search page.)

rholler

Member
Posts: 4

rholler @ 2023-04-14 16:03:19 UTC

But I've had other multiple word searches for songs that weren't in the database, and they've resulted in a message to that effect. Of course, I can't think of an example right now.


It's odd that this particular song title returns that seemingly random page, while other similar searches didn't. (?)

josephmurphy

Certified Contributor II
Posts: 49

josephmurphy @ 2023-04-14 18:10:02 UTC

Well, there's lots of words in the existing database, but not *all* the words. Smile "Slight Figure of Speech", for example, isn't in the database yet and returns a "no records found", but "Slight Figure" returns a forum post using the words "figure" and "slightly". "Slight Of" returns 10 forum posts, none of them titled "slight of" anything.


Though of course now, or whenever the index updates, "slight figure of speech" will return this forum post. Smile


If a search result looks wrong, try opening the odd answer and CTRL-F for the individual words in the search. That's how I established that all the words you typed are in the result you got. (Someone typed the full lyrics to two versions of the song into the comments field, and it's a long comments discussion, so that particular entry probably generates a lot of false positives. This might be an argument that the comments field shouldn't be searched outside the Detailed Search.)


Now, if they're not there, that would be a very interesting indexing error. But in this case they definitely are.

rholler

Member
Posts: 4

rholler @ 2023-04-14 22:32:16 UTC

I'll just take your word for it. ;-)

Mathieu

Manager
Posts: 7289

Mathieu @ 2023-04-24 14:51:41 UTC

The "problem" is that this submission contains complete lyrics, thus matching on many search queries.