Search OR function not returning all matching results

[bobsbrickstuff]

Looking for heated clothes dryers, and decided to use the OR function get the results for both spellings, but it's showing less results than it should

"heated clothes drier" - 555 results

"heated clothes dryer" - 1'100+ results

"heated clothes (drier, dryer)" - 429 results, after clicking 'See more results'

The condition/location etc parameters are the same across all searches, so not sure what's causing it? Also the OR search on the phone app gives 621 results and many are different to the desktop site results.

 

 

[ccla3379]

Hmm, not sure.  My 'or' searches seem to be behaving themselves as far as I can see.

Could you try structuring the query as

( ( "heated clothes dryer", "heated clothes drier", ) )  

and see how it compares?

[ccla3379 · Accepted solution]

Ah, your pictures are showing queries without quotes so they will be fuzzy matched hence giving large numbers of matching items (lots or airers etc) mentioning some/all of those words or similar meaning.    I think by adding the bracketted clause on the end then you are requiring the search result to definitely have either of the specific words 'drier' or 'dryer' in the result rather than a synonym ... hence the lower number.

[bobsbrickstuff]

Aahhh, yeah that's it... I just tried putting all the words in their own pair of quotes ("heated" "clothes" "dryer" etc) and the results add up.

Found another glitch while testing though, different sorts gives a different number of results too, do you know why that is? 

 

[eburtonlab]

different sorts gives a different number of results too, do you know why that is?

The "Price plus shipping: lowest first" sort order has been providing filtered results for a long time now. Often there is a message about "streamlined" results with a link to see more results, but from time to time the streamlined message may not appear, and in some cases the filtering may be drastic. The effect is dependent on the keywords used when searching.

Lately the "Best Match" sort order has been having the opposite effect; choosing that sort order often returns more results than other sorts. Apparently the keyword substitution feature operates differently when choosing that sort order.

[ccla3379]

Sorting - yes I have seen occaisions where counts vary a bit when different sorting criteria have been applied but as there are no nice reporting tools to help me other than pawing through the items one at a time and building a workbook with all the items and their values to perform the comparisson it took so long that I could not be certain that some of the items which got sold /relisted during my gathering didn't contribute to the results.

The factors I suspected (but have no certaintly regarding) are: -

• Where items have variants such that several of the variants might match some but not all the criteria in the search - how does it manage the counting?  Feels like it could easily overcount.
• Are the item counts correct or just database row estimates?  These numbers are quicker and easier to get than the actual count of records but may be a little bit off as they use index references which may have become stale.
• Pagination (PITA!) - I'm fairly certain there is a 'feature' which causes the numbers of matched+sorted records to vary based on the number of items selected for the page size.  It is probably just a boundary case (counting the last record twice or similar) and not serious but it is a good reminder for me to try and see if I can get this to be a repeatable problem.

In the meantime I would not take the search results to be definitive - treat them a bit more like a Google search than, say, searching through one's bank payments.