Today we received a question about searching for the item Bathrooms : moneysmart makeovers by Rick Peters, and it brought to light some known bugs (1807 – that a colon (:) messes up the search and 2604 saying that a slash (\) does the same). Here are some additional search tips, courtesy of Mickey:
- NEVER include punctuation of any sort in a catalog search. Commas, colons, semi-colons, question marks, exclamation points, and periods should always be omitted. This issue is fixed in Community Koha 3.2, but at this time special characters may cause faulty results.
- Since a Keyword search looks at all the data in the record, feel free to MIX SEARCH TERMS from author and title fields. You can even include publication information if you know it. So entering the words “peters” and “bathrooms” would return your item. Just those two words alone.
- Look for UNIQUE or less common search terms. Presented with a title like Bathrooms : moneysmart makeovers by Rick Peters, you would want to find a UNIQUE or uncommon term: moneysmart certainly qualifies in that regard. So using that single term moneysmart is all you need to put into the search box. If you know the author’s name, you could put that in your search as well.
- Avoid TOO MUCH detail in Keyword searching. No need for complete titles. Omit articles the and a, an and conjunctions or and and.
- Remember that Koha uses a fuzzy logic search, and will return near-matches and “mystery” matches because is doesn’t stick with exact search terms. So don’t be put off if you get more hits than you think you should from Keyword searches in Koha. Look at the top 5 hits to see if your desired item is there. After the first five, most of the items below are fuzzy matches. If you don’t see what you need in the first five items, re-try your search using different terms.
Happy Searching,
Sharon