Why different search results in online library vs computer program (stand alone version) ?

IngeRoman
When I search a specific term in my group library online or on my computer 'Zotero stand alone', I retrieve different search results. In my 'stand alone' I find much more items. How is this possible as it is exactly the same library that is synced?
Thank you
  • dstillman
    The online library currently has a much more limited search. It should be roughly equivalent to Title, Creator, Year in Zotero, and there's also an option for searching the full-text content of attachments. In the client you can use All Fields & Tags mode, which will search all fields and notes and produce more results.
  • Gurdas_Sandhu
    edited October 11, 2017
    "It should be roughly equivalent to Title, Creator, Year in Zotero"
    Actually no. The online search is so basic that I find it useless.

    As an example, I search for "heavy clark" in my online library and local Zotero. Both are in the 'Title, Creator, year' mode. The results:

    Local Zotero finds 40 items
    Online library find 0 items

    The online search considers more than one words as one phrase, thus it is looking for the exact phrase "heavy clark", which does not occur and thus zero results. In my library "heavy" is a common term in title and "clark" is an author.

    Example 2, I search for "nigel clark" which is the first and last name of a author

    Local Zotero: 72 items
    Online: 27 items

    Example 3, search for "chris frey" which is the first and last name of a author

    Local Zotero: 163 items
    Online: 0 items
  • dstillman
    Fair enough. It's equivalent in that it's searching the same fields, but it's true that it currently does only phrase searches.

    (For examples 2 and 3, it concatenates the first and last name of creators and does the phrase search on that, so if an author is "Christopher Frey" and you search for "Chris Frey", it won't find it. Same with initials. If you just search for "Frey" or "Clark" you should get more or less the same results, though obviously in a large library that might produce a lot of results.)

    Needless to say, this is an area we plan to improve.
  • IngeRoman
    Thanks a lot for the answers ... forgot to say that! It clarified a lot.
  • dstillman
    The web library now performs non-phrase searches by default. You can add "double quotes" for phrases, as in the client.

    Since individual words are now separate search terms, chris frey without quotes will also now find the author "Christopher Frey".
  • Gurdas_Sandhu
    This is great, thanks. I tested some of the same search phrases and results from local and online library are identical, except for one outlier case (marked with **).

    search term: heavy clark
    local: 41
    online: 41

    search term: nigel clark
    local: 78
    online: 78

    search term: "nigel clark"
    local: 28
    online: 28

    ** search term: chris frey
    local: 181
    online: 180
    possible cause: The difference is due to item TZ7A38PB which has separate authors with the words Christensen and Frey in their names

    "chris frey"
    local: 0
    online: 0

    search term: christopher frey
    local: 180
    online: 180

    search term: "christopher frey"
    local: 180
    online: 180
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