Announcement Much improved search features

Second Summer

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  1. Vegan
As you may be aware, you can search VF using the search feature accessible from the magnifying glass icon in the top right corner.

If you were used to the VF search, then you will know it had some limitations such as the requirement that search words had to be longer than 3 characters - which would make it impossible to search for e.g. 3-letter acronyms. It was a "dumb search", for lack of a better term.

If you were used to the slightly more intelligent search feature on VV, then the VF search would have felt like a step backwards.

So I'm happy to announce that we now have the search features we used to have on VV which include:
  • ability to use short search words (FBI, CIA, UFO, ...)
  • word stemming: A search for "fox" will also return results for "foxes" and vice versa. A search for "cook" will also include results for "cooks" and "cooking". Etc.
  • search suggestions as you type (not enabled on mobile devices)
  • "did you mean" feature if you misspelled a word
Note also that some characters have special meaning - this is probably way beyond what most people need, but oh well!
  • + signifies AND operation
  • | signifies OR operation
  • - negates a single token
  • " wraps a number of tokens to signify a phrase for searching
  • * at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
  • ( and ) signify precedence
  • ~N after a word signifies edit distance (fuzziness)
  • ~N after a phrase signifies slop amount
  • In order to search for any of these special characters, they will need to be escaped with \.
 
I tried:

What's in your garden?

to find the thread, and got all the most recent posts containing "in," including within a word.

So you have to put phrases in quotes:

"What's in your garden?"
 
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