Discovery Search Configuration

[Andrew Thompson]

Hello,

My organisation is looking to improve the discovery search in our instance of DSpace (currently running DSpace 8.0).

The key problem I’ve been tasked with solving is searching our author’s name Bev doesn’t return all of their results. For example, searching Bev returns 11 results, whereas searching Beverly returns about 70 results.

The thing I don’t understand here is why Bev returns less search results even though it’s a broader search term.

A few ideas I’ve been able to come up with is:

1. Adding wild cards (* asterisk) before and after each word/token/term in the search (either in the frontend or config for Solr).
2. Changing the search algorithm from Lucine to Extended DisMax (eDisMax) Query Parser. I’ve attempted this but no luck yet.

Does anyone have any practical advice/suggestions on how to improve this?

Kind Regards,

-Andrew

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hi Andrew,

I cannot answer all your questions, but I can perhaps fill in some gaps.  Essentially, DSpace's  Discovery search is just a wrapper around Solr.  So, these results are the results that Solr sends back to DSpace for each of these search terms.  The question as to *why* the search is working this way is one I don't know the answer to. But I suspect it may be solvable in the Solr configs, as Solr is the one deciding which results are returned for every search.

We also do have some basic docs on how various advanced searches can be run (manually) at https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC8x/Search+-+Advanced   But, this is really just documenting the default search behavior of Solr itself.

Tim