How does "quorum matching" work?

[fnorfensuld]

One of the advanced search features on FA is called "quorum matching". What does that mean?

 

[Stratelier]

It means that you supply a quoted list of keywords and the search will only return results that match a minimum # of keywords from that group (regardless of which ones specifically) -- e.g. "A B C" /2 is effectively (A and B) OR (A and C) OR (B and C).

A quorum of /1 is equal to OR while a quorum of /x (x being the full number of terms) is equal to AND.

(The term itself originates from law where a quorum is the minimum number of persons from a group required to be present to discuss and vote on topics, like passing bills and legislation)

For a more advanced example, there are at least ten different spellings for "gryphon" (counting both singular and plurals) and just 3 on FA happen to use specify seven of them, one of them even specifying eight terms (which you can easily spot in its list of keywords).

Though this seems like a feature with rather limited usecases....

 

[fnorfensuld]

It means that you supply a quoted list of keywords and the search will only return results that match a minimum # of keywords from that group (regardless of which ones specifically) -- e.g. "A B C" /2 is effectively (A and B) OR (A and C) OR (B and C).

A quorum of /1 is equal to OR while a quorum of /x (x being the full number of terms) is equal to AND.

(The term itself originates from law where a quorum is the minimum number of persons from a group required to be present to discuss and vote on topics, like passing bills and legislation)

For a more advanced example, there are at least ten different spellings for "gryphon" (counting both singular and plurals) and just 3 on FA happen to use specify seven of them, one of them even specifying eight terms (which you can easily spot in its list of keywords).

Though this seems like a feature with rather limited usecases....

thanks for explaining

 

[yak]

Stratelier has already explained the specifics (thanks!), and I would just like to add that it is only one of the many advanced search query features supported by Sphinxsearch, the software product behind the search feature on the mainsite.​

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You can learn a lot more about the other advanced features in the technical documentation if you like: http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/manual-2.3.2.html#searching​