Search: Fix word exclusion in client side search

[cglukas]

Purpose

The built-in search is capable of excluding search terms. Thats a great feature which would make the search a lot better! Unfortunately, there are two blocking components:

• The splitQuery will discard hyphens which define the excluded terms
• The performTermsSearch will abort the search if any excluded term is matched

References

Closes #13892

[cglukas]

Regarding the CI: I don't see any changes on my PR which would trigger the current CI fail. Is this a common issue? TBH it does not look like it's affecting the master branch too 🤔. I'm a little aimless what to do here.

[jayaddison]

Regarding the CI: I don't see any changes on my PR which would trigger the current CI fail. Is this a common issue? TBH it does not look like it's affecting the master branch too 🤔. I'm a little aimless what to do here.

That's OK, yep - I believe that is due to bug #13886 (in progress, potentially to be fixed by #13883).

[jayaddison]

A delayed thought here: adding the exclusion operator to hyphenated query terms could cause unexpected results.

For example, the query example -test-case currently parses to ["example", "-test", "case"], I think.

[cglukas]

A delayed thought here: adding the exclusion operator to hyphenated query terms could cause unexpected results.

For example, the query example -test-case currently parses to ["example", "-test", "case"], I think.

Hi @jayaddison, that's a valid concern. I can imagine two scenarios:

1. The case word gets excluded as well.

   • ✅ Benefit: This would work without a major change in the datastructures.
   • ❌Downside: If we try to find a page with the words "example" and "case" because "case" is excluded even though we never wanted to exclude all "case" occurrences.

2. The excluded word would be test-case.

   • ✅ Benefit: We can actually exclude "test-case" and the limitation from above is fixed.
   • ❌ Downside: I think we either need to modify the searchindex generation for that because hyphenated words are not stored. This would probably introduce a lot of unwanted changes. Or we add a mechanism to chain excluded words together. Right now they are all chained with an OR condition. To get test and case to work, we would need to add a AND condition and an additional attribute that defines this for each excluded word (could also be a mapping).

Altogether, I think that this is a very valid concern. Still, I would not address this in this MR but rather open another one to get the bugfix out quickly :grin:

[cglukas]

Hi there,

I think the github actions are quite flaky. The "python3.11 docutils 0.20" run failed twice and the "windows" run failed once. AFAIK I never changed something related to the failing checks. And I managed to resolve these fails just by committing an empty line in the conf.py of one of the new fixtures.

It's nothing that's related to this PR. It's probably also a known issue, am I right?