Search isn't giving the right results

Hi Michael. Before I have a play around to test these, can you confirm you are using the quote marks in all your searches above? So definitely 

"surrealism NOT magic"

not

surrealism NOT magic

?

Was it really too much effort to spend a few seconds to try it yourself? You probably spent more effort doing the reply. It is quite obvious what I was doing - I said how many results I get. Do you not get the same number of results?

No. I don't get the same results Michael. That's why I asked.............

Are you using quotes or not in your searches? Because the results are quite different depending if you do or don't. 

I get zero results with " "surrealism NOT 9783791378145" " and 403 results without the quotes. How many do you get?   Something is wrong with this site if things aren't reproducible if you're using normal logic...

So yes, obviously with the quotes the NOT would be treated as part of a string and not a logical operator.
If I add NOT I should get less results, not 20 times the number of results.
The help page says it is to exclude results: "iPod NOT shuffle will give you results for iPods but exclude references to shuffle".
So my guess is that "surrealism" is returning results only with that in the ad title, and the NOT seems to make it now include results where the term is in the description.

When you add quotes to your search it searches title and description. Without quotes it (generally) only searches titles.

However the quotes also asks the search engine to search for all the terms within it. I don't think the BOOLEAN words work when you enclose them in quotes. So if you type "surrealism NOT 9783791378145" it is going to go looking for any listing with the words surrealism, not , and 9783791378145. Because there are no listings on the website with those words you get a result of 0.

My post has gone into pending it reads as below

I was not adding quotes so it should not decide to start searching the description.  but it does when there is the boolean.
Yes, as I said above "obviously with the quotes the NOT would be treated as part of a string and not a logical operator."   NOT/AND being a boolean logical operator.

Correct. It looks like adding a boolean is causing it to search title and description. 

The search has been bad for so long.

Searching title and description should be the standard way, people shouldn't have to cram stuff into a title to get their listing found.

A good ranking algorithm, smart tokenisation, normalising, and stemming -  good full text search isn't that hard, there are solutions out there. 

Doesn't matter if it returns a thousand, ten thousand, a million results as long as the ranking makes the first 20 are the ones you were actually looking for.

Kia ora Michael and Callum, I've passed this on to the team to look into, thanks for raising it.

Hi James. The problem was there were people deliberately screwing results by adding description keywords to bump their items up the list. It was very common in clothing. For example people might have a pair of socks listed. Then they would say "Similar to adidas, nike, puma, champion, Calvin Klein, etc etc. So someone searching for "adidas socks" would get the sellers item come up relatively high in the search results. When they weren't adidas socks at all. 

I'm sure these days there are more nuanced ways to deal with that. But it was Trade Me's response at the time (years ago)

Trouble is some people haven't really caught on to how search works on Trade Me. Their title might be "jeans for sale" with details about the brand, colour, size, age in the description instead. Then they get surprised when they don't get much interest or their item sells for a low price.  

Oh, I see why you were getting a different number of results.  If you read the very start of my statement of the issue you will see i was searching in the category Books only.
Now that you've clarified that search was to be title only, to address the issue of keyword spamming, then okay I'm fine with that. I needed the booleans to work on the item description too to get rid of stuff I didn't want.
Perhaps what is needed is to clarify the behaviours in the help section.