Search Issues

danjransom

Using the latest version (4.0.16). Standalone. Running on Windows 7 and 8.

1. Advanced Search doesn't work at all. Tried searching by title, author, "contains", and "does not contain". No results are ever returned. Sent debug output to Zotero server ID D550498269

2. Quick search is often too quick to begin search. It doesn't always wait for a pause in typing. So if you are searching for "brown" this causes searches for "b", "br", "brow", etc. This is intermittent. Sometimes if you can get a full word in, but often not.

3. The search index doesn't appear to work. Index statistics on the Search tab of the Zotero preferences always say Indexed: 0, Partial: 0 even after using the "rebuild index" tool. Searches are often slow and searching uses high amounts of CPU.

adamsmith

1. have you had this working in the past?
2. quick search has, I believe, a 3sec delay before it starts searching. If you need it to wait until you confirm, you can start a search with a quotation mark (") and then press return to start searching.
3. You do have attached pdf files with OCRd text?

danjransom

I never tried the advanced search before, but with the problems we had with the quick search we gave it a try. For clarification, we are talking about the Advanced search found by selecting that option under "Edit" in the menu bar. It opens a dialog box.

The quick search does not seem to be respecting the three second delay. Tried on two separate systems. Your trick with the quotation mark does work and we can use this as a stop gap temporarily.

We do have quite a few PDF files. Some may contain OCR'd text. On one system we do not have a PDF indexing tool installed, but on another we do. Both have the same symptoms -- no indexed items are reported. 5000+ "unindexed" items are listed.

adamsmith

ah - by default the advanced search only searches "My Library" - if you're trying to search a group, which it sounds like you are when you say "we" - the only way to currently do that for a group is to right-click on the group and create a saved search. (this is not a permanent state of things)

For the indexing issue - the way to start troubleshooting is to go on a computer with the pdf indexing tools installed (they need to be installed via Zotero, not just on the system in general) and try to manually index a file that you are sure has machine readable text (embedded or OCRd) by clicking on the green arrow next to "Indexed - No". See what happens and we can take it from there.

Re: quick search - sorry, I misremembered the 3secs. It's 1/4 of a sec and it's short on porpose so that it is, well, quick.

slumpkins

I recently set up a group library and didn't realize advanced searching in group libraries is not possible (unfortunately, this is an important feature for the purposes of this particular group). Is it likely that this capability will be added in the future?

adamsmith

that's not quite correct. You can use advanced search in groups via right-click --> saved search. It's just two clicks more. As I say above, the ease of doing this is likely to improve in the future, but no ETA.