Verbatim and double quote confusion

GregZuro

When I search for "virtual the hazard" I get no results ("We haven’t found anything.
") when 'All Results' is selected.

When 'Verbatim" is selected, I get about a dozen results, only one of which has those words together (with elided punctuation) as specified.

(This sort of thing has been happening to me quite a lot lately.)

Also, the help site does not define what "verbatim" means.
I think that I know what it means ( 🙂 ), but given the site's behavior, I'm left confused.

I expect to receive only results that contain 'strict' matches of the quoted string (allowing for punctuation) with a 'Verbatim" search and some larger number of results (certainly non-zero) with an "All Results" search.

z64

Hi GregZuro ,

Assuming you meant you searched for "virtual the hazard" (including the quotes), the difference is that Verbatim is equivalent to searching for "virtual" "the" "hazard". So instead of needing to contain the whole, uninterrupted phrase with nothing in between, results only need to have all 3 terms, but in any order.

Hope that helps. We can definitely look at improving the docs around this.

GregZuro

Yeah. That's not clear from the docs that I could find.

Vlad

GregZuro Can you point the docs in question? You can also edit them if you would like as they are fully open source, otherwise we will add this clarification.

Do you have a suggestion for what we can change in the no results message to make it clear to you what was happening without the need to consult docs?

GregZuro

Also, @Vlad seems to says the opposite ("entire phrase") in this thread: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1349-option-to-disable-automatic-spelling-correction/5 .

GregZuro

Vlad I'd be happy to update docs once I understand how it's supposed to behave. 🙂

The explanation of 'verbatim' is just "it's on or it's off": https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/verbatim.html
That's all I could find about it. Folks seem to have an understanding of what it is (mostly?) in the forum posts, but I'm not sure how they got that understanding.

Also, in the description of the various search operators (https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html), I *think that the two occurrences of "term of phrase" should be "term or phrase"?

And:

"words" — Finds the exact words in a phrase, for example: "survival is insufficient"

is ambiguous.
Maybe: "in 'All results' it finds the exact phrase"; "in verbatim is finds results that contain all the words in the given phrase, individually"?

There's no discussion on that page of how verbatim may or may not change those operators.

Again, I can fix up these items once I grok how it's supposed to work.

GregZuro

What is the ruling on verbatim with quoted phrases, BTW?

Also: what's the difference between "virtual the hazard" and virtual the hazard in verbatim (with vs without quotes).

Thanks,

z64

GregZuro Would definitely appreciate the hand in updating the docs 😃

It is definitely intended to work as I described before; the full description is something like:

Filter out all results that do not contain each individual term of your query across the title, URL, and snippet.
The Verbatim filter setting is remembered between searches. To turn it off again, select "All Results" from the drop down, or press "Clear" in the filter bar.

The motivation of the feature is an easy way to expressly opt-out from any kind of "fuzzy" matching that might elicit related results not directly associated with your query, including any kind of spelling correction that might occur.

Also: what's the difference between "virtual the hazard" and virtual the hazard in verbatim (with vs without quotes).

Good question. I would say what happens right now is rather undefined; let's ignore that and agree on what it should do - then we can make sure it happens. I can think of two different semantics that might make sense:

As described, verbatim functions as if quoting each individual term. Quotes, with verbatim on, could be used to explicitly expand the grouping.
- Example: foo "bar baz" qux -> Interpreted as "foo" "bar baz" "qux", requiring bar baz to appear in that explicit order.
Alternatively, quotes in verbatim searches require that the literal quote characters themselves must appear in the results, just as any other letter you typed.

Personally / from my own experience: (2) might sound more intuitive to some, but I think it has much less practical use. I am also not sure if upstream indexes are even capable of interpreting that correctly or giving good results, but I can look into it if there is agreement that is what should happen.