https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171199
--- Comment #20 from Eyal Rozenberg <[email protected]> --- (In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #19) > May the truth be with you. But I see no proof. Proof is a very high bar. Most of our bugs have no proof. The bar here should be: Does the evidence we have at hand suggest, that bag-of-words semantics is more useful than exact-phrase semantics? And when we put the question this way, we need to consider the positive evidence we have on both sides of this dilemma. We don't have "proof" any of the two is more useful than the other. The evidence we do have (or at least, some evidence): * I claim that it is quite common for people to remember some words they used or read within a paragraph, without the full exact sentence. e.g. did I read "it was an exceptionally beautiful morning" or "that morning was exceptionally beautiful"? * Most (or all) search engines, and many/most web-based search systems, use bag-of-words semantics by default. * The proven fact that bag-of-words results contain exact-phrase results, while with exact-phrase we effectively have no way to perform a bag-of-words search. The question of how inconvenient it is to iterate only the exact-phrase results within the overall bag-of-words results is a valid one. * Anecdotal evidence by the users who have commented here suggest that bag-of-words is just as useful. and of course - let's remember than if we do bag-of-words by default, we still have exact phrase via regular expression, for free, up to avoiding regex syntax. And in principle we could control whether the search will be regex, bag of words or exact phrase (or words-in-relative-order) via a drop-down instead of the current toggle. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
