Searching with partial Searchterms and Wildcards in Front - a lot of missing Pages

Let’s say we have pages containing the word “loremipsum”.

If we use the search and type in “loremipsum” we get 100 results.
If we use the search and type in “*emipsum” we only get 20 results.

It is my understanding, that if we use the wildcard in front of the searchterm we should be getting the same amount of results (or even more because of matching other words). Is this not correct?

Right now a search with a partial searchterm and “*” in front yields a lot less pages in the results.

Is there a problem here or is our understanding of the search wrong?

FYI:
We are using LTS 10.11.8 and have this workaround with __INPUT__ __INPUT__* active. My questions are regarding the dedicated search-page though, not the search-suggestions (they have these pages missing too).

Greetings

Not exactly. Suppose you have a wiki page that contains “loremipsum” whose language is set to “XY”. The language of the page is very important because it influences the way the content is indexed by Solr. French content is indexed differently than English content. Now suppose that “lorem” is the root of the “loremipsum” word in “XY” language. If that is the case then Solr will index the “lorem” token for this page.

If you search for “loremipsum” and the current UI language is “XY” Solr will do the same processing and obtain the “lorem” token which will match the one from the index and thus the page will be found.

If you search for “*emipsum” then Solr will not process the query term. Instead, it will look for index tokens that end with “emipsum”, which means it won’t find our page.

So the things you need to remember are:

  • the search query terms are processed by default in a similar way in which the content is indexed, and it depends on the language
  • using wildcards in a query term disables this language-dependent processing of that query term

Hope this helps,
Marius

Thank you very much for the detailed answer. I will read into the SOLR documentation and see what/if we can do something about it.

Greetings