Is there a way to search for a specific word only, and not similar words?

[LightJuly]

I’m searching for comments about the pram brand Cosatto.

Advanced search is showing me results for Cosatto, Charlotte, Cosette, Costco and so on.

How do I search for a specific word?

Are you soetng by relevance? If I do that the ones with the correct word are at the top so I can ignore everything below the last one with the word higlighted

Hi @HebeMumsnet just wondering what the outcome is, is there any way to search for the actual search word only?

@LightJuly i totally agree with you on this and find this aspect of the advance search function extremely frustrating. All well and good when selecting the ‘relevance’ tab, but when selecting ‘newest’ the most random words are thrown up and mostly completely irrelevant to the searched for word.

Hi there @LightJuly . We still can't find anything that's actually 'broken' here. The search will show up similar words to take account of typos and that sort of thing. However, if you put the word in speech marks - eg "Cosatto" it should only return that specifc word. Could you try that and let us know if that's working. If not and you're able to post a screenshot here of the results returned that would be really helpful.

Hi, well I guess the issue is that search seems to be programmed to purposefully throw up similar words, which is frustrating for a number of users.

I tried the double speech marks upthread and it doesn’t work. I just tried it again to see if it’s changed - I put “Cosatto,” but there’s still Costco etc coming up. A way you can tell it doesn’t work is if you search for a word without speech marks, see how many hits you get (Cosatto = 2500), then search for a word with speech marks, you get exactly the same number of hits (“Cosatto” also = 2500). When in theory it should be fewer, seeing as the ‘similar’ words have been excluded.

If search can’t be changed back to only
showing the exact word, perhaps the only answer is to add a tick box saying ‘exact word only’ or similar, which would then really only show the exact word searched for. Thank you ☺️

Just done a search for the word head, and got results including heading and headless. Please change search back to finding the exact word only, please…

Yes, I just did a search for “college”.. when filtered to newest first, half of the posts are finding colleague etc.

Yes I often get similar words when using search.
When obviously I discount those suggestions and those are useless because I search a particular word because I want a particular word, not because I want other words!

Okay, this is getting silly now. I have just done an advanced search for one of these words, and it brought up results with the following words highlighted:

Man
Manual
Manually
Many
Manoeuvres
Manipulation
Manifestations
Managing
Manage
Managed
Manageable
Management

This isn’t a question of ‘typos.’

Are we simply to take it that advanced search has been rendered useless?

It is really silly

Back again, am looking for reviews of the Nuna Cudl baby carrier. When I search ‘cudl’ to see what people have said about it, search throws up the following terms:

Cudl
Cudling
Cudlly
Cudly
Cudles
Cudle
Cudli
Cudlies
Cudlled
… and more

Please MN, let us have the option to search for the exact word only. Please! Surely it can’t be hard for tech to add a tick box?

As an aside, I see Nuna are currently running a paid promotion on MN. I wonder how they would feel knowing that users can’t perform a reliable search for their brand?

Hi again @LightJuly . We've had another look at this. Yes, using " " around a word should return the exact results but when the search for that specific term 'runs out' it will then add on other similar possibilities, too. So you should primarily get exact results but then also some of these 'similar terms' which can just be ignored presuming it's returned all the 'exact' results first.

This is fairly typical of a search function, we're afraid, and hard to change. It's designed to help people with typos which in the majority of cases it would. But as we said, the results you want should be there and more prominent.