I forgot to switch on advanced searches on kwakk.info

The other day, I was wondering whether there was a way to improve the search quality on kwakk.info, the comics fanzine search engine. And it turns out that the search engine I’m using in the background, Xapian, has a lot of operators like NEAR and ADJ that sound interesting, but they don’t work on kwakk.info.

And it turns out that I was just calling the engine with a set of options that inadvertently switched this off. I’ve now fixed that, so you can now drill further into the data.

For instance, take a search for crumb herriman. The first result for this is above — but as you can see, it doesn’t really deal with them in relation to each other; they’re just mentioned on the same page.

With crumb NEAR herriman, you can ensure that the words are close to each other, which will give you more relevant results.

There’s also crumb ADJ herriman, which means the same as NEAR, but crumb has to come before herriman.

And there’s other things in there — you can group expressions and all sorts of things, and you can say ADJ/4 to say that the words have to be within four words of each other, etc. Nerd out.

I’ve also added a short help text to the site that you can reach from the menu, so hopefully that will… help.

Hm… perhaps NEAR should be the default boolean operator instead of AND? Hm… no, looking over the logs, that doesn’t seem to work well. For instance, people do searches like Arnold Drake interview, and in that case, you often have interview in the heading and stuff, but not necessarily the name.

Ideally, what we’d want is a AND search, but ranked by nearness? Xapian doesn’t allow that… but I guess it could be done by running the search twice — one with NEAR and one with AND, and then smushing the results together in a good way.

Or… a checkbox to toggle between NEAR and AND.

Well, we’ll see.