Brief technical information notice for EIN members on bug fix for single character searches and improvement of search word stemming
EIN members should note that the search engine has been improved and a recent bug has been fixed.
• Since a previous upgrade, searches containing single character terms (e.g., a single letter appellant name or the digit '4' in a search for "Tier 4") may not have returned the correct results. This is now fixed and searches that include single character terms will now return results as expected.
Unfortunately the Covid-19 pandemic delayed our planned fix for this. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
• The stemming algorithm used by the search has been changed and we think users will find it is a noticeable improvement on the one used previously. Stemming is what enables a search for 'walk' to also find 'walking', 'walks', etc.
The new stemming algorithm is dictionary-based and is less likely to include unwanted results by overstemming words.
Note also that you can use the * wildcard as a suffix to widen your search (for example, invest* will also find investment, investor, investigate, etc). See the help guide for more.
• The handling of alphanumeric terms within phrase searches (e.g., "paragraph 276ADE(vi)") has been improved.