As of Feb of 2024, the search feature on SuttaCentral is still in active development. Please share any bugs or unexpected behaviour with the search in this thread.
There are a few other search related development threads:
It appears that everything after the volpage: and the citation gets ignored.
What is odd right now is that it seems to be returning every single occurance of any match to the volume and page, even if it isnāt in the right collection.
Ah, right. The screen shot I was showing was of the results page. Sc actually has two related but separate search features.
Your screen shot (I call) instant search. It instantly offers suggestions. It will accept filters, but the icon to show the filter help isnāt there. Itās difficult to work out where to put it because of mobile layout constraints.
So just do what you were doing and type moats, for example, and press enter or press the search icon.
This will take you to the results page. Then you will see the filter icon on the top right.
Ah, thank you.
That mostly works. That is, it did when I tried a few random volpages for mn, sn, and an. However, not for dn, which is odd.
Iāll play around with it a bit more.
I was looking for a sutta where Nandaka teaches a tree-simile. So I tried Nandaka AND tree but this did not give any results neither did Nandako AND tree - I found the sutta another way, which is MN142 MN146. But it has Nandaka in it and tree, but no results?
Perhaps they need to be in the same segment/sentence/paragraph for this to work?
Itās MN 146, I think.
If I search in:mn nandaka itās the first result. The only actually, I just see different translations in different languages according to my language setting.
No, absolutely not. The words can appear anywhere in the text.
You may have to clear your cache to see the new instructions for filters. (BTW, I donāt like this requirement and hopefully it will get changed so they can appear anywhere in the search string)
Currently the full database search (which is what you see in the shot above) is not going to give results for that search because there is no fuzzy/typo allowance. However, in the āinstant searchā (AKA Algolia) you get the proper sutta as the only results:
Ah, itās the match partial. If you untick that it should work.
This is absolutely a bug. @HongDa, any ideas? There is also this issue with partial matches. Not sure if it is related. Just searching nandaka with match partial works. So perhaps it is something to do with the AND
Ooh. Thatās great feedback. If it was working, it means that you could search nandak AND tree and then it would return both nandaka and nandako. It would also do tree and trees. I think eventually singulars/plurals will be built in automatically, though.
It is especially important for Pali. The reason searches arenāt always match partial is that some short words are ubiquitous as parts of other words. E.g. ācatā is everywhere in both Pali and English.