disable search for similar keywords?

Stream: Zulip meta

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

The documentation says that

Zulip will find messages containing similar keywords (keywords with the same stem), so, e.g., wave will match waves and waving.

and I wonder if this is really a bonus. I was trying to search for "red" and all messages containing " 're" (as in "they're"), "read", "re-" show up: I let you imagine the pleasure. Given that Lean-Zulip is aimed at a programming language where adding/subtracting a single character can make a huge difference, I wonder whether this "sloppy" behaviour is appropriate.

[Julian Berman]

The 're thing specifically sounds like it may a stemming bug for red / re whatever specifically, not that I'm any expert -- but IIRC it should be stemming using some "known" way of which words have the same stem, and that sounds wrong clearly. I agree though about the general behavior that it's often very annoying to do this. Double quotes works in some search engines, or back in the day +, but it seems neither of those work here. EDIT: It looks like Zulip uses Postgres's text search to implement this, with some dictionaries...

[Damiano Testa]

Yes, I tried several times to use double quotes to get exact matches only, and was always disappointed.

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

Exactly, none of those work here.

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

Is it something that can be configured?

[Damiano Testa]

I do not know if it can be configured, but at least activating double quotes would make the search experience much better.

[Alya Abbott]

Thanks for the suggestions. I filed https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/27587 to keep track of this feature request, but unfortunately it would be quite a bit of work to implement.

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

Thanks!