Quick Search question / suggestion

dvs0826
Probably close to 100% of the time, when I use the quick search bar, I am only searching for items with the word I enter in the *title* of the paper. However, Zotero seems to use some sort of "relevancy" heuristic to display items which are probably related based on keywords, fulltext indexing, or other methods which I'm not aware of. You can identify these items because their title entry is a light grey color in the zotero list window, as opposed to the normal black for papers with title word matches.

Is there any way currently to have quick search return *only* those items with the word in the title? If not, would it be possible to add this functionality? I'm not sure how other people are using zotero, but more often than not I'm either entering the title of a specific paper or a unique word from the title of a specific paper, and often I'm cluttered with hundreds of other papers to search through to find the one I want.

If such an option is not possible, is it at least possible to unconditionally display entries with search terms in the title at the top of the search results? These could be further ordered by number of search terms in the title. So like the entry with the most matching terms is at the top, then the next most matching terms, etc. After that, all the entries with lower relevancy could be listed.

Thoughts?
  • dstillman
    edited December 15, 2009
    There aren't different kinds of matches. Items in gray are non-matching parent or child items of matching items. Matching items match on any field, tag, or attachment content.

    I don't know when it'll happen, but there's a ticket for multiple quick search modes, which would likely include a title-only search.
  • dvs0826
    Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "parent or child"?

    Case in point -- I have one paper called "A performance-oriented data parallel virtual machine for GPUs". This is at the top level. The only child of that is a node for the actual PDF file stored on my disk, which is called "p184-peercy.pdf". So "render" is neither in the PDF filename nor in the title of the document's top level node. It's also not in the Zotero metadata for this entry, the PDF file entry does not contain any notes, and the top-level document node contains 0 notes, tags, and related documents. However, if I enter "render" into the search box, this shows up in the search results in gray. The PDF file entry titled "p184-peercy.df", which is a child of the gray node, is black.

    So I'm not sure where this is coming from.

    Assuming what I've described is not actually a bug (hopefully you can clarify), how do you feel about the possibility of displaying black top-level nodes before grey top-level nodes, at least in the interim until multiple mode quick search is implemented?
  • dstillman
    Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "parent or child"?
    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/library_items
    However, if I enter "render" into the search box, this shows up in the search results in gray. The PDF file entry titled "p184-peercy.df", which is a child of the gray node, is black.

    So I'm not sure where this is coming from.
    "render" appears in the attachment content, which is indexed.
    how do you feel about the possibility of displaying black top-level nodes before grey top-level nodes, at least in the interim until multiple mode quick search is implemented?
    All item views sort based on the selected column. This wouldn't be trivial to change and isn't likely to be in the near future.
  • dvs0826
    Ahh, yea I suppose that makes sense.

    Well, I guess the only other thing I can think of that would somewhat alleviate my troubles is if the nodes didn't auto-expand, and instead all black and all grey nodes were displayed collapsed. But perhaps this is undesirable for other reasons or otherwise difficult to implement with the current design.

    The problem is that it's matching over 500 documents when all I really want is 1. Anything to reduce the number of things I have to scroll though would help. I could also just use the advanced search, but I'm so accustomed to using quick search that it's become second nature.
  • dstillman
    You can hit the "-" (minus) key (when the items list has focus) to collapse all nodes.
  • dvs0826
    Thanks! That's a good workaround for now until multi-mode quick search is implemented.
  • dstillman
    One more thing you may or may not be aware of: if you know the beginning of the title, just starting to type it when the items list has focus will move the selection to that item. (E.g., if an item begins with "render", you can just click any item and start typing "render".)
  • ajlyon
    One more thing you may or may not be aware of: if you know the beginning of the title, just starting to type it when the items list has focus will move the selection to that item.
    More precisely, if you start typing, the selection will move to a matching item, but matching is not necessarily by title. It will match based on the current sort column, so it's even more flexible than title matching.

    Thanks for mentioning this feature-- I hadn't noticed in over a year of using Zotero.
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