I am indexing some entities that have up to 140 fields in the resultant document - ie lots. I am providing a simple/powerful google-style search of such entities using the _all field - however, to make the user's life easier, we do prefix searches. (e.g. rather than the user having to type "johannesburg" or "aluminium" - they can just type "joh" or "alu").
We display the results in a grid (with number of columns much less than 140!) The users are new to this kind of search, and while they appreciate the many benefits, they are sometimes confused by hits they don't expect. E.g. they may search for johannesburg, expecting to get a hit on the location - but get some odd hits because someone has put "johannesburg" in a comment for something whose location is not johannesburg - and this is compounded by the fact that they can't necessarily see why they got a particular hit (because we show less than 140 columns - and some things like comments are unsuitable to show in a grid. In my experience its a bit of a common problem - you tend to want to show the user the fields they can search on - but in reality, there are always more fields that you want to search on than you want to display (esp as columns). The question is how to assist the user to see why something matched. The problem is we are searching on _all so traditional highlighting doesn't (and probably will never) help. My question is are there some other tricks that anyone can suggest that will help the user understand why they got unexpected hits? E.g. One of my initial thoughts is that the nature of prefix search means they might get more false-positives than expected simply because they haven't typed enough characters. e.g. "joh" will get all items located in "Johannesburg", but also get all items created by "John". My thought was that maybe just showing (in a tooltip) the matching term might be of some help - ie if the user sees "John", they know that simply typing one more character - ie "joha" will eliminate a raft of false-positives. Thoughts? Cheers... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elasticsearch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elasticsearch/dc7bd363-2190-40fc-9e98-f37e8552d33c%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
