Wikipedia wildcard search not working? - search

I'm trying to do a wildcard search on Wikipedia but the search is not behaving the way the instructions say it should. Here's the advanced search help page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Advanced_search
As an example, it says this regarding a Wildcard search:
the query *stan will match Kazakhstan or Afghanistan or Stan Kenton.
However, when I attempt to do that search (or even click on the embedded link to that search), I only get
the page *stan does not exist
and it just lists a bunch of "Stan" entries starting with "Stan Laurel filmography."
Why would this feature not work? Am I missing something?

It does work, however because direct matches for "stan" are scored higher than words with it, Kazakhstan is waaaay down in results. You can try slightly narrowing the results with intitle:*stan however this is still bad. However, a quick check with k*stan shows that it works.
Conclusion: user-written help page has a bad example.

Related

Verbatim search in azure/cognitive/bing web search (API, not website)

I cannot find any option to achieve a verbatim azure/cognitive/bing Web search.
In my case the difference is trying to sift through tens of millions of irrelevant search results to find the 10 results that actually match my query literally.
Even though I am a paying customer, there is no support available. And the API documentation did not help either.
I would think it should be super easy to provide a verbatim search option. Is there one that I did not see?
I checked further and it seems for the Bing Search APIs - +"phrase" works and returns documents containing this phrase at the top. Just add + in front of what you have been trying. Support link is here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/plans/.

Banning search terms

This is my first post here, sorry if I am doing it wrong. I've already searched for my question and could not find it.
I run a video meta-search engine.
I was recently banned from Google Adsense for having pages that contained 'adult content' and 'adult keywords'.
I would like to know how to ban the search of words like 'sex' on my site. Thanks.
In your code, when they click search, or press enter, the "method" that is called should just search the string for those keywords. If it has one that's blocked, don't let it display the results. One note is that there are many videos that are adult, but don't have a name that would reflect it. You may consider filtering the results by there content rating.

Solr behind Drupal returns too many results for specific query

We've got Solr sat behind one of our client's Drupal 7 websites, and while it's working well, it returns too many results for what should be quite specific queries. (It also has relevance/weighting problems; but I'm hoping that solving this problem will remove the - literally - irrelevant results.)
For example, searching for the phrase 'particular phrase in london' should return the node with that as its title, quite high up; I don't even think that any other content should be returned. But I find that it's returning lots of content, purely on the fact that it mentions "London"!
Frivolously, searching for the ridiculous phrase 'piecrusts in london' returns a lot of results too, apparently just because they mention London. No content on the site mentions actual piecrusts.
When I search for 'particular phrase in london', here are the parameters that end up in the catalina.out log on the server (whitespace added for clarity):
{spellcheck=false&facet=true&f.im_field_health_topic.facet.mincount=1
&facet.mincount=1&f.ds_created.facet.date.gap=%2B1YEAR
&spellcheck.q=particular+phrase+in+london
&qf=taxonomy_names^2.0&qf=path_alias^5.0&qf=content^40&qf=label^21.0
&qf=tos_content_extra^1.0&qf=ts_comments^20&qf=tm_vid_3_names^200
&facet.date=ds_created
&f.ds_created.facet.date.start=1970-01-01T00:00:00Z/YEAR
&f.bundle.facet.mincount=1&hl.fl=content,ts_comments
&json.nl=map&wt=json&rows=10&fl=id,entity_id,entity_type,bundle,bundle_name,
label,is_comment_count,ds_created,ds_changed,score,path,url,is_uid,
tos_name,tm_node,zs_entity
&start=0&facet.sort=count&f.bundle.facet.limit=50&q=special+phrase+in+london
&f.ds_created.facet.date.end=2012-01-01T00:00:00Z%2B1YEAR/YEAR
&bf=recip(ms(NOW,ds_created),3.16e-11,1,1)^150.0
&facet.field=im_field_health_topic&facet.field=bundle
&f.im_field_health_topic.facet.limit=50&f.ds_created.facet.limit=50}
hits=1998 status=0 QTime=14
Note that these parameters have been built by Drupal's Apache Solr module; I don't believe we've got any particular custom code of our own that's doing anything to it.
This corresponds to the following URL, if entered directly in the browser:
http://example.com:8081/solr/CLIENT/select?spellcheck=false&facet=true&f.im_field_health_topic.facet.mincount=1&facet.mincount=1&f.ds_created.facet.date.gap=%2B1YEAR&spellcheck.q=particular+phrase+in+London&qf=taxonomy_names^2.0&qf=path_alias^5.0&qf=content^40&qf=label^21.0&qf=tos_content_extra^1.0&qf=ts_comments^20&qf=tm_vid_3_names^200&facet.date=ds_created&f.ds_created.facet.date.start=1970-01-01T00:00:00Z/YEAR&f.bundle.facet.mincount=1&hl.fl=content,ts_comments&json.nl=map&wt=json&rows=10&fl=id,entity_id,entity_type,bundle,bundle_name,label,is_comment_count,ds_created,ds_changed,score,path,url,is_uid,tos_name,tm_node,zs_entity&start=0&facet.sort=count&f.bundle.facet.limit=50&q=particular+phrase+in+London&f.ds_created.facet.date.end=2012-01-01T00:00:00Z%2B1YEAR/YEAR&bf=recip(ms(NOW,ds_created),3.16e-11,1,1)^150.0&facet.field=im_field_health_topic&facet.field=bundle&f.im_field_health_topic.facet.limit=50&f.ds_created.facet.limit=50
This URL returns nearly 2000 results - that's most of the content on the site! I've experimented with removing each query parameter at a time, and the only one to make any difference seems to be qf and q: if I remove qf, zero results; if I remove q, I get more results back!
I guess there are two questions here:
Is there anything in these parameters that tell Solr "don't worry if 'particular phrase', or 'piecrusts' appears: just collate the results for 'london'" and then order by relevancy? I would add that I think 'in' is mentioned in the stopwords file, so we can probably ignore the effect of that (?)
Or is this something in the (standard Drupal) schema that I need to change?
I appreciate that sometimes search is better for the visitor if it's inclusive; Google does return results even if it doesn't find perfect matches. But, stopwords and stemming aside, the client does require that searches return only results where all words appear in the content.
As mentioned in the post at http://drupal.org/node/1783454, the Apache Solr Search Integration module makes use of the mm param, which is more or less configured to effect rankings by how closely the keywords are in the dataset. Looking through the docs there are other ways you can use the parameter to effect rankings as well. Therefore the results produced by Apache Solr Search Integration are weighted more closely to the AND operator even though it will return more results as you add more keywords. The benefit of this param is that in cases where the user enters keywords that are too restrictive, results will still be returned. Displaying no results is a really quick way to guide people away from your site.
How are you displaying the search ?
Maybe you could solr views to limit the search range ?
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr_views
thanks
Nick

Why and how does the googlebot use my website's search engine?

Looking through my search logs from time to time, I notice that by far the biggest user of my search engine is the google-bot. What gives? Is it looking for content that might not be directly accessible through navigation? If so, how does it know which words and phrases to look for (they're surprisingly relevant). Does it check the most popular keywords on the site? I know I seem to be answering my own question here, but this is really only working it out from first principles. I'd like to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about (i.e. not me).
If your search form's method is get instead of post, each search has its own url, and people might be posting those urls elsewhere. Or if you have a (possibly inadvertently) publicly accessible webstats page that listed those urls, that's another common way for search engines to stumble upon your internal search urls. A third way I've seen is sites that list recent searches on their pages, but this is more intentional. "MySQL Performance Blog" does this to an annoying extent, so any search of their site from google yields hundreds of pages of similar searches, even if none of them found what they were looking for.
Edit: Looks like it does on occasion, but only GET forms:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/crawling-through-html-forms.html
Google will use words that occur on your site in search boxes to try to find pages that it can't otherwise.
Google says that for the past few months, it has been filling in forms
on a "small number" of "high-quality" web sites to get back
information. What words has it been entering into those forms? Words
automatically selected that occur on the site, with check boxes and
drop-down menus also being selected.
http://searchengineland.com/google-now-fills-out-forms-crawls-results-13760

How to get a description of a URL

I have a list of URLs and am trying to collect their "descriptions." By description I mean what comes up, for example, if you Googled the link. For example, http://stackoverflow.com">Google: http://stackoverflow.com shows the description as
A language-independent collaboratively
edited question and answer site for
programmers. Questions and answers
displayed by user votes and tags.
This the data I'm trying to accumulate for the URLs I have.
I tried parsing the URL's meta-descriptions, however most of them are lacking a meta-description (yet Google and other search engines manage to get a description somehow).
Any ideas? Should I just "google" each link and scrape the data? I have a feeling Google wouldn't like this...
Thanks guys.
Different search engines have different algorithms to get the description out of the page if/when they are lacking the description meta tag. Some ignore the tag even it it's there.
If you want the description Google has, the most accurate way to get it would be to scrape it. Otherwise, you could write your own or look around on the web for code that does it.
These are called snippets.
Google use proprietary (and possibly patented) methods to garner this information, so there is no simple answer.
As you suggest, they will use meta-description information if it is there. (How to set the meta-information to help Google.)
They will also honour requests from the page authors to NOT include snippets. (How to prevent Google from displaying snippets) You should probably respect this too (as well as robots.txt, of course.)
You may have some luck with existing auto-summary packages, such as OTS.
You may want to check AboutUs.org (i.e. http://www.aboutus.org/StackOverflow.com).
But, there's little chance that the site will have an aboutus page and not have a meta description.
Some info that might explain how google does this:
Webmasters/Site owners Help
Adding a URL to google
I am not familiar with Google APIs, but perhaps there is an official way to get such information.
Interesting. some sources are better than others.
For "audiotuts.com" google has a worse description than AboutUs.com.
Google
Nov 18th in General by Joel Falconer ·
1. Recently, an AUDIOTUTS reader asked me about creative process. While this
is a topic that can’t be made into a
...
AboutUs.com:
AUDIOTUTS is a blog/tutorial site for
musicians, producers and audio
junkies! It is the sister site of the
popular PSDTUTS, VECTORTUTS and
NETTUTS.
I hate problems like these... they should be trivial but they aren't!
If you can assume English content, you can first look for Meta Description, and if that doesn't work, you can look for the first two or three sentence-like word sequences.
A product I worked on looked for the first P or DIV that contained more than one sequence of > n "words" delimited by periods. It would use the two or three sentence-like sequences, up to x total words, as a summary paragraph. It wasn't 100% accurate, but good enough for the average case. The number of words was adjusted a few times to eliminate things like navigation elements.

Resources