AND does not appear to work correctly

tinat · Unread post by **tinat** » Mon Nov 18, 2002 3:59 pm

When I do a search in my manual using AND, i.e. procedure AND ranking, it does not appear to work correctly. The search gives me pages that have only procedure and only ranking, as well as both words. This is a big issue for us as our support people are using the manual to help clients, and the search isn't narrowing the topics down making it easier for them to find what they're looking for. Am I missing something or is this not working correctly?

Thanks, Tina

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Mon Nov 18, 2002 5:36 pm

When you say "in my manual" I assume you're talking about the MMHelp format. If so I think you're right -- I just tried generating one and it looks like AND is behaving as though it's OR. However, I also experimented with entering just the words and frankly, everything seems to work as OR, i.e. the viewer will display all topics containing any of the words. The only exception seems to be quotes -- if you enclose a phrase in quotes you will only find topics with that phrase.

I would assume that this is the intended functionality but since this is something that's not covered in the documentation it's hard to say for sure. (Alex is away at the moment and will be back at the end of the week.)

Probably something for the Wish List section...

tinat · Unread post by **tinat** » Mon Nov 18, 2002 5:45 pm

Thanks. I'm glad to know that it's not just me. I did try the NEAR function, and this works much better than AND. This narrowed my search topics significantly. I tried using quotes too, but unfortunately for this to work, my search must be for words next to each other, which I'm not always doing, sometimes it's just 2 keywords that must be included in the same page.

Thanks, Tina

Wed Nov 20, 2002 12:28 pm

Are you talking about the MMH (MultiMedia) help format?

The MMH viewer just supports a very simple search function: a consequent OR search on all the words you enter. It would increase the viewer exe size significantly if we give it a more advanced search engine. Furthermore, the viewer is built to be run even from a read-only media like a CD. So we cannot build a full-text-search database and save it to disk like Winhelp or HTML Help does.

tinat · Unread post by **tinat** » Wed Nov 20, 2002 2:07 pm

No, I am using the CHM Help Format, which offers me the option of AND, OR, NEAR, or NOT.