Searching quoted phrases in artwork db

[vr8hub]

Last March (#484), I had an issue searching for a compound word in ebooks, and on that same issue discussed searching for quotes. @colagrosso, you said:

Regarding your question about quotes, we recently (Feb 2025) enabled support for searching with quotes. For example, searching for "war and peace" works:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=%22war+and+peace%22

And that does work—in ebooks. But it doesn't work in the artwork db—searching for a quoted phrase (in this case "black mask") returns hits from the individual words ("black" and "mask"). It may or may not return hits from the phrase as well, but it turns out it doesn't occur. Or at least I'm pretty sure it doesn't occur. But I can't search for it, so I don't know. :)

Is there a reason we didn't add the same support for searching for quoted phrases to the artwork db? I would think we want the UX for search to be the same in ebooks and artwork.

[acabal]

Part of the issue also is that the search query doesn't look at the public domain exception field, which is the only place the phrase "black mask" appears in these artworks. So we should also look at that field in searches.

[colagrosso]

Thanks for the feedback, Vince, and thanks for the write-up here:

https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/raSeTEo_ypE/m/w0SHi_sWCQAJ

Is there a reason we didn't add the same support for searching for quoted phrases to the artwork db? I would think we want the UX for search to be the same in ebooks and artwork.

That's a fair UX expectation. It's not a good reason, but the reason I didn't add support for quoted phrases for artwork at the same time I added it for ebooks is that the implementation of search for artwork and search for ebooks use different approaches, and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get quoted search working for artwork.

These are the artwork search lines in particular I'll have to look closer at:

web/lib/Artwork.php

Lines 1085 to 1089 in 1628c51

	// Split the query on word boundaries followed by spaces. This keeps words with apostrophes intact.
	$tokenArray = preg_split('/\b\s+/', $query, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
	// Join the tokens with `|` to search on any token, but add word boundaries to force the full token to match.
	$tokenizedQuery = '\b(' . implode('|', $tokenArray) . ')\b';

I'll take a whack at it after I finish up #502.

I'll also add the public domain exception field (Artwork::Exception) to the list of fields that we query against.

[vr8hub]

Great, thanks, Mike. Ignoring whatever technical reasons there are for the difference, I guess I'll say as a user I expect to be able to search the same way in either database, however it happens on the backend. IOW, we should be able to search for quoted phrases in artwork just like we do in books, for the same reasons, and search for in books just like we can in artwork, etc. We shouldn't have to think "am I in books or artwork?" before doing a search, or remember two sets of rules for searches. A search should be a search.

But, as always, I am not in charge. This is just one user's opinion. :)

[vr8hub]

And since we're here…

I just tried to search on "O. Henry" (with the quotes) on ebooks, and got seven pages of results. The one "O. Henry" title was included in the results, but so were another 75+ entries that just matched on "Henry," not "O. Henry." (I tried it first with just "O Henry," no period, with the same results.)

I tried a couple of other quoted searches and they worked fine, so there appears to be something "special" about "O. Henry" that's turning a quoted search into a non-quoted search. Whatever that is, I don't think it should be doing that. :)