Searching NSF file shows more results than there should be.

[PiTRiFF]

Here is my situation.
Lotus Notes 6.5

I work at a law firm and one of the Paralegals has hundrends of NSF files to review. I have loaded one for her and indexed it. There are 47,000 emails in the NSF. She opens the search feature and types the name SMITH. When the search finishes it states that there are 5,000 items that meet that criteria. When you start looking through the results the majority of the 5000 items returned in the search do not contain the word SMITH anywhere. If she does a search under the name JONES she is told there are 2415 files that meet that criteria and all of the results that come back do indeed have the name JONES in everyone.

Im dumbfounded. Could the word SMITH be in those emails in an area that I can't see?

 

[pmonett]

It very well could.

The Full Text Search goes through every field of the document and checks that field's content against the search criteria.

In itself, there is nothing special in what I just said, except that Notes has possibility of hiding fields from display under certain criteria. Thus, it can very well be that there are dozens of fields in the documents that you cannot see, and one or more of those contain the criteria you are looking for. Since the fields are hidden, the fact that the document shows up in the results is not understandable.

This is known behavior, and it has been since the beginning of the FTS functionality. Many people I know are thus wary of FTS in its standard form.

A much better method is to use the specific query language that FTS understands. When you are looking for a given criteria in the body of a document, it is useless to search over the whole document.

You can restrict the search to the body of the document by using a syntax such as this :

FIELD body CONTAINS "Smith"

With this query, you will ensure that only the documents in which the message part contains "Smith" will be retained in the search results.

Pascal.

I've got nothing to hide, and I'd very much like to keep that away from prying eyes.