* Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

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JonAxtell
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by JonAxtell » 16 Sep 2007 17:51

I would like to see the Find function in FH to have the same and better functionaltiy as Wordpad's. For example, Wordpad allows search to find whole words, not just if the search criteria is within a word. Also it performs it seach for contiguous words.

AND and OR would also be useful because then search can be made for phrases or not. Currently FH's limited find functionality ONLY allows search for any word in a record. If a search for a phrase is made, many extraneous matches are shown which can sometimes make the whole point of searching using the Find useless.

For example, say I wanted to search for King County*. FH will ONLY find records that mention King or County so I will get matches for Kingston as well as any mention of a County. If I want to search for 'King County' (contiguous words) then I have to load Notepad to perform the search! Now that is saying something about FH's searching capabilties! [eek]

Using AND and OR, or quoted text to look for contiguous words would make FH perfom just like nearly every other Windows program and many website's searches.

* King County as in Washington, USA

ID:2504

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philjo
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by philjo » 16 Sep 2007 18:56

Searching for distinct phrases in Quotes should be supported, as should boolean searches (AND/OR/NOT) and NEAR - all these are supported by searches in Google, etc.
It makes things much easier, especially when looking for common terms.

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Jane
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by Jane » 17 Sep 2007 08:14

Surely all the advanced searching can already be done in queries. Just use the contains text query for the 'King County' search.


And/Or support in Queries is already on the list.
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My Family History : My Photography "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."

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JonAxtell
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by JonAxtell » 17 Sep 2007 09:16

Anyone who has used queries will realise that it doesn't solve the problem. Performing a query on King County produces the same problems as using Find in that the results include any record containing the words (sorry, better description is LETTERS as bucKINGhamshire and worKING get included) king and the word county - not very useful. I want to do a quick search for a phrase, not setup a query to perform something simple. [frown]

Another thing against queries is that it doesn't indicate which part of the record contained the text, requiring a manual search of all the fields that could contain the word, which if a note is long means that you have read the whole note since you can't perform a quick search of the single note looking for the words in question. [confused]

The thing is that Find should be the quick and simple method of perfoming a one off search, Query something that you will want to do again and again.

When you have 20,000 individuals and a 10Mb Gedcom, searching and getting the right result quickly becomes very important.

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Jane
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by Jane » 17 Sep 2007 10:44

I must be missing something, when I use the find option and search for 'melbury osmond' I find all the records and only the records with 'melbury osmond' and not those with 'melbury bubb' or 'melbury stampford'. Similarly searching for 12 highfield' only matches '12 Highfield' and not '14 highfield' or '12 westhouse'
Jane
My Family History : My Photography "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."

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JonAxtell
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by JonAxtell » 17 Sep 2007 11:36

You're close in understanding my problem. When I search for King County I get results including such things as 'working in Hertfordshire county' which is obviously not a useful result.

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ChrisBowyer
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by ChrisBowyer » 19 Sep 2007 14:00

My two penneth... I've often found myself just giving up when a quick search doesn't work... can't be bothered to do a query for a one off. Recently wanted to find where I'd mentioned St Mary instead of (my preferred) St Marys. No chance... and not sure what the solution is for that one either.

I'm not sure I'd really want AND and OR... seems to me if I type 2 words it's self-evident that I want items that contain them both. I can always do OR by searching for each word seperately, but the (Google style) quoted search (for an exact phrase) would seem sensible.

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MCGaylard
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Find - to allow AND/OR and also by whole word

Post by MCGaylard » 28 Sep 2007 10:47

As a daily user of SQL I find the query logic operators extremely limited.

However, as a way around find strings I simply open the gedcom file with notepad and use a delimited string search. Of course it does not get me passed compound searches but it does help!

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