TWiki search doesn't work as expected

There are two usability issues to the TWiki search function:

1. The Twiki search does not search in the topic names but only in the topic bodies. It is not possible to search both in one query.
   • Followup in SearchScopeForTopicAndText
2. The search does not look for all words entered. Instead, TWiki uses a literal phrase search.
   • Followup in KeywordSearchWithImplicitAnd

These problems are cruical! An information database can only be as good as the quality of information retrieval is.

People deploy TWiki and store a lot of information in its webs. If they search for words they expect the search to work like they know it from the search engines, i.e. to find pages where all search terms occur.

TWiki somehow does not work this way! This does not only frustrate users but also lowers the acceptance to deploy TWiki in a corporate environment. People in charge will always ask "Why install TWiki if the simple search function is broken?". So this needs to be fixed soon.

Test case

Go to SearchSuggestion and press "Search".

The search will not find the page SearchSuggestion although both words you searched for are on that page!

-- DanielKabs - 06 Feb 2003

• Moved the AND search discussions to KeywordSearchWithImplicitAnd
• Moved the topic AND text scope discussions to SearchScopeForTopicAndText

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Oct 2003