The other day I was doing some searches in my site and the following occurred.

1) Searching for same string multiple times returns a different number of results.  For instance searching for Polyheme on my site sometimes returns 2 and sometimes 3 results.

2) Searching for words I know are included in entries returns an error: No results found.  It seems to me, the search through the entry part isn’t always working here, as searches for the words in title seems to work except for instance of #1.
For instance I searched for Blogfather and Vik separately and both returned no results, yet there was one post that had both words in it at the time (now there is a second post with Blogfather).

Something just doesn’t seem to be working right.

It seems to be only affecting the simple form.
Just so you can see:

Take a look at the “Simple Search” documentation.  You have search_in=“ffp” as a parameter and that isn’t a valid value.

Nope, no difference in my results using the simple form.

This is the output of the form with the search_in removed:

If you don’t specify a value for “search_in”, then EE defaults to only searching the entry titles.  Is that not consistent with what you’re seeing?

No, the simple form does not seem to return any results.
For instance go to www.seadoc.net.  You’ll see a sticky entry with the word “Blogfather” right there in the title.
Now go to the search in the right column and type in Blogfather.  No results returned, and it should have at the very least returned THAT entry should it not?

Now do the same thing with the advanced search.  It returns either one or both entries containing “blogfather.”

Oh, and to reiterate, when it does return a value, sometimes it returns different numbers of results (ie.. polyheme will sometimes return 3 and sometimes 4 entries) and that is with either the simple or advanced search.

I changed the search_in value to “everywhere, and things seem to be working better now, but I did notice that “Sticky” posts seem to be ignored by the search results.

I think that is what threw me, as I couldn’t find anywhere in the documentation (I may be blind) that says that sticky posts are ignored by the search engine.  It also explains why the number of results was different depending on which search you used (simple or advanced) since the Simple was searching title/no stickies and the Advanced searches “everywhere” (still unsure of stickies there).

It makes sense that Sticky posts wouldn’t be included since they are the first posts in the blog and the easiest to find.  I just didn’t pick up on it till I started trying to figure out why the simple search wasn’t operating right.

Thanks Chris.