Singular vs. plural in searches

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  trailmaster · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 2:10 am

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  Just noticed that if you use a plural in a word, the singular form does not show up in the search. If I use the word “books” for instance, then nothing will show up for a search of “book”. Hope that’s wrong, but if it’s true then every plural noun won’t be searchable in singular form.

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  trailmaster · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 2:16 am

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  Here’s a real example:

  From the main WordPress search box entering “hurricane poster” my recent post does not appear. But “hurricane posters” does.

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  trailmaster · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 2:47 am

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  More search discoveries:

  The blog title has “Hurricane Posters”, but none of the following searches will show anything:

  hurricane poster
  hurricaneposters
  burricanposters

  Bottom line seems to be that for title searches (and I assume the tag search is the same) you need to have a 100% exact match for words. Plural, singular, misspelling, wrong spacing, anything, will affect the search result. Google handles most of this stuff just fine.

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  thesacredpath · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 2:49 am

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  The search here is quite simple when compared to honest to goodness search engines. Search engines have massive amounts of algorithms to determine misspellings and whether an ending “s” is actually just part of the word, or whether it represents a plural version of a word. This takes massive amounts of storage space, and millions of lines of code.

  You can use Google to search only wordpress.com blogs by using

  site:wordpress.com searchterm

  Replace “searchterm” with your desired search term(s) and it will bring back more than the wordpress search does.

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  trailmaster · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 3:18 am

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  Thanks – that cleared up the questions.

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  thesacredpath · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 3:21 am

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  I just use Google. You get much better results.

  And you are welcome.

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  raincoaster · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 3:56 am

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  You can use Google to search the forum only by using

  site:en.forums.wordpress.com searchterm

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  thesacredpath · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 4:01 am

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  I’ve used that a couple times today Rain, thanks for clueing us in on it.

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  raincoaster · Member · Sep 1, 2008 at 4:03 am

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  I’ve got it in my bookmarks. Thanks to Jennifer for reminding me of it.