Thank you. Lucene documentation is vague on this subject. On the LIA-book -earch powered by Lucene it seems the "-" operator works as a prohibitor regardless of the number of spaces after the "-". Still can't tell if this is a bug or by design.
A Nutch parser, however, seems to have changed that. I checked two Nutch/Lucene implementations the web - Indeed.com and at Oregon State. Their parsers provide a more "standard" public web search behavior. I.e. the "-" is treated as a minus only if no space between it and the search term. Otherwise the "-"becomes just another search term in the query. -Felix Yonik Seeley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On 1/23/07, Felix Litman wrote: > Does a special character lika a "-" prohibitor operator require no-space > after it in order to work as a prohibitor? > > Typically on the web, e.g. Google and others, the "-" operator works as a > boolean prohibitor only when not followed by a space. Otherwise it is treated > as just a dash query term. > > But in our Lucene implementation the the "-" seem to be acting as a > prohibitor even if there is space after it. For example. in a query: Sales > + service , the 'service' term is excluded by Lucene. (Same for the > "+" operator.) > > Is this space-treatment a bug or a standard Lucene query parser behavior? I think this is expected, and changing it would be more confusing. Consider: If "-" is expected to find a dash, surely "-x" should find a dash followed by an x? If you want literals, put quotes around your terms... "Sales + service" -Yonik --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
