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Just recently I was looking for some questions with a particular word in the title or the main text, but search no longer seems to find them. For example searching for the word "gender" yields nothing, yet there are 84 hits from Google of questions containing that word. This used to work as far as I can remember. Having this ability is really important for finding duplicate questions, for example.

What's going on?

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  • same with metapost [tikz-pgf]search it misses completely the hobby answers.
    – percusse
    Mar 6, 2013 at 20:59
  • 2
    Hendrik Vogt didn’t hesitate: meta.stackoverflow.com: Search doesn't work as expected, neither does the “Related” bar
    – Qrrbrbirlbel
    Mar 7, 2013 at 16:15
  • This is also true for other type of search: tex.stackexchange.com/… gives an empty set.
    – Claudio Fiandrino
    Mar 7, 2013 at 18:03
  • 2
    I do not think, it would be useful to add dozens of other examples, but here is an impressive one: Searching for mentions of the phrase "coffee stains" in questions (I could remember I had read at least one before; I aimed to link to one of them) tex.stackexchange.com/… does find nothing, not even tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=coffee does find one of these questions. With google.de/#q=%22coffee+stains%22+site:tex.stackexchange.com the first two results are the ones I wanted to have.
    – Speravir
    Mar 7, 2013 at 23:53
  • This seems to have been corrected?
    – Werner Mod
    Mar 11, 2013 at 19:53
  • @Werner: It appears so, yes - but no official reaction so far.
    – Hendrik Vogt
    Mar 11, 2013 at 21:17
  • @Speravir: Can you please also check?
    – Hendrik Vogt
    Mar 11, 2013 at 21:18
  • @Werner yes it appears to be fixed.
    – Alan Munn
    Mar 11, 2013 at 21:29
  • @HendrikVogt It appears the search is as bad as before. ;) Do you want to update the meta.so question, too? Anyway, an official reason/reaction would be interesting to read.
    – Qrrbrbirlbel
    Mar 12, 2013 at 1:31
  • @HendrikVogt The first link in my comment above (repeated: tex.stackexchange.com/… ) should find (at least) 2 questions, but does find only one – what nonetheless is a great achievement in relation to the situation some days ago.
    – Speravir
    Mar 12, 2013 at 2:05
  • @Speravir: Omit the "", then it finds both - not 100% sure why.
    – Hendrik Vogt
    Mar 12, 2013 at 7:35
  • @Qrrbrbirlbel: I wanted to wait a bit before updating yet again. Why do you say it's as bad as before? Do you mean "still bad, but less bad"?
    – Hendrik Vogt
    Mar 12, 2013 at 7:36
  • @HendrikVogt When you say this, comes in my mind, that this happened to me already in another case, but I forgot later. This is clearly a bug, because it is an explained possibility in the “Advanced Search Tips”.
    – Speravir
    Mar 12, 2013 at 14:53
  • @Speravir: You're right, and thanks for pointing it out at Meta.SO!
    – Hendrik Vogt
    Mar 12, 2013 at 15:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

There was an oddity with the stem parser on a few indexes a few weeks ago. This has since been corrected and results should be back to normal.

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