Serious Fulltext Search Limitations

[rfool]

⚠️ This issue respects the following points: ⚠️

• This is a bug, not a question or a configuration/webserver/proxy issue.
• This issue is not already reported on Github OR Nextcloud Community Forum (I've searched it).
• Nextcloud Server is up to date. See Maintenance and Release Schedule for supported versions.
• I agree to follow Nextcloud's Code of Conduct.

Bug description

The fulltext search allows you to search for things containing a given search term.

What is missing:

• parts of the entered search term are always combined by disjunction - there is no hint to how (if so) you can combine by conjunction,
• constraints to restrict search to a given folder (when its about files, but actually, when its about "fulltext" - you realize the mess when you understand this, right???)

Steps to reproduce

1. search
2. fulltext
3. whatever

Expected behavior

Real-World-Usabi.lity

Installation method

None

Nextcloud Server version

28

Operating system

Debian/Ubuntu

PHP engine version

PHP 8.2

Web server

Nginx

Database engine version

MariaDB

Is this bug present after an update or on a fresh install?

None

Are you using the Nextcloud Server Encryption module?

None

What user-backends are you using?

• Default user-backend (database)
• LDAP/ Active Directory
• SSO - SAML
• Other

Configuration report

No response

List of activated Apps

No response

Nextcloud Signing status

No response

Nextcloud Logs

No response

Additional info

No response

[rfool]

#821

[rfool]

constraints to restrict search to a given folder (when its about files, but actually, when its about "fulltext" - you realize the mess when you understand this, right???)

I probably should explain this:

• in nextcloud you have different "search result types": for our case, we have "files" and "fulltext" results:
• "files" result types come from results of search on filenames of files (surprise: who'd have guessed that !!? No, really, I did NOT expect that, in Nextcloud UI when filtering on "Files" I did NOT expect that actually meant FILTER ON FILENAMES);
• "fulltext" result types come from results from search on a fulltext search facility (ie "elasticsearch").

Now, these "fulltext" results usually represent FILES. But these do not have the properties of FILE results, at least not in a useable way at this level of abstraction..

And thus, fulltext search in NextCloud is missing ONE fundamental feature:

RESTRICT the fulltext search to files from Folder X and below.

This is just not possible by design, right?

[komoricodrutz]

I noticed this too in the global search options.
However, there is the separate "full text search" app. If you install it, it will only perform the full text search and if you click on one of the results, it will open the folder and highlight the file of that result.
The only beef I have with this app is that it spits out only 10 results per page and a lot of pages...

I clicked on the first result from the above and it opened a new tab (I have set up my nextcloud to open all apps in new tabs) to where that file is located and it highlighted it:

And the OCR part works excellent, btw. I noticed that it recognized text from poor quality pictures, taken 15 years ago, with an old non-smartphone...

[rfool]

I noticed this too in the global search options.
However, there is the separate "full text search" app. If you install it, it will only perform the full text search and if you click on one of the results, it will open the folder and highlight the file of that result.

That would be nice. I tried it - and it does not highlight the file in its folder. It just links to the folder. Kinda useless.

The only beef I have with this app is that it spits out only 10 results per page and a lot of pages...

Well, at least a start, could be improved.

But actually, the real missing part for me is a combination of fulltext search and filtering on folders. So, that I can do a fulltext search over all files in a folder (and descendants).

[rfool]

BTW: ...

the OCR part works excellent

Yes! And the fulltext search, in and of itself, works excellent too!

But the interface to the user is not really useable, because of some parts missing:

1. you can not filter results by folders (kinda like categories, groups, ...),
2. there is no ranking on the the search results - at least no really useable ranking.

__

I will try to provide actual examples soon - but screens or videos of such data unfortunately need some blurring applied. 😟

[XueSheng-GIT]

1. you can not filter results by folders (kinda like categories, groups, ...),

I found this issue nextcloud/server#42915 which may be related.

Generally I assume it makes more sense to report single specific issues instead of a general issue "Serious Fulltext Search Limitations".