Change Details

The Help:Searching documentation for [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching#Logical_operators | boolean search operators ]] (`AND`, `OR`) describes how things might be expected to work, but it is far from the way things actually work. In particular, parens are completely ignored (so `(blue OR red) AND green` and `blue OR (red AND green)` in fact give identical results) and logical operators are mapped in an unexpected way to Lucene `MUST` and `SHOULD` queries (so `blue OR red AND green` doesn't do either of the things you would expect it to do). The current plan is to write a short bit of documentation for the Help page saying that parens are ignored, boolean `AND` and `OR` do not behave in the expected way and should probably not be used for the time being, and that the plan it to implement them properly in the future—along with a link to a longer page explaining how things actually work, including how queries are parsed and converted to `MUST` and `SHOULD` queries, explaining what those actually do, and expanding on our future plans to support proper boolean queries and explicit/intentional `SHOULD` queries. Once we properly support boolean queries and parens, we can change the Help:Searching docs back to what they are now, more or less, and put a big disclaimer on the more detailed page that it works like it is supposed to.

The Help:Searching documentation for [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching#Logical_operators | boolean search operators ]] (`AND`, `OR`) describes how things might be expected to work, but it is far from the way things actually work. In particular, parens are completely ignored (so `(blue OR red) AND green` and `blue OR (red AND green)` in fact give identical results) and logical operators are mapped in an unexpected way to Lucene `MUST` and `SHOULD` queries (so `blue OR red AND green` doesn't do either of the things you would expect it to do). The current plan is to write a short bit of documentation for the Help page saying that parens are ignored, boolean `AND` and `OR` do not behave in the expected way and should probably not be used for the time being, and that the plan it to implement them properly in the future—along with a link to a longer page explaining how things actually work, including how queries are parsed and converted to `MUST` and `SHOULD` queries, explaining what those actually do, and expanding on our future plans to support proper boolean queries and explicit/intentional `SHOULD` queries. mw:Help:CirrusSearch should also be reviewed and updated as necessary. Once we properly support boolean queries and parens, we can change the Help:Searching docs back to what they are now, more or less, and put a big disclaimer on the more detailed page that it works like it is supposed to.

The Help:Searching documentation for [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching#Logical_operators | boolean search operators ]] (`AND`, `OR`) describes how things might be expected to work, but it is far from the way things actually work. In particular, parens are completely ignored (so `(blue OR red) AND green` and `blue OR (red AND green)` in fact give identical results) and logical operators are mapped in an unexpected way to Lucene `MUST` and `SHOULD` queries (so `blue OR red AND green` doesn't do either of the things you would expect it to do). The current plan is to write a short bit of documentation for the Help page saying that parens are ignored, boolean `AND` and `OR` do not behave in the expected way and should probably not be used for the time being, and that the plan it to implement them properly in the future—along with a link to a longer page explaining how things actually work, including how queries are parsed and converted to `MUST` and `SHOULD` queries, explaining what those actually do, and expanding on our future plans to support proper boolean queries and explicit/intentional `SHOULD` queries. mw:Help:CirrusSearch should also be reviewed and updated as necessary. Once we properly support boolean queries and parens, we can change the Help:Searching docs back to what they are now, more or less, and put a big disclaimer on the more detailed page that it works like it is supposed to.