Why are we getting more results than expected for an "exact phrase" search?

Environment:

Phrase Search Options for Incidents and Answers
Customer Portal, Oracle B2C Service, All versions

Issue:

I am searching through our answers for the string "customer waiting" and I get several answers found. One of the resulting answers does not contain the string "customer waiting". It contains the word "wait" so it's not expected in the results of an "exact phrase" search.

Resolution:

When using the exact phrase search technique, answers with the same pattern of words are matched and displayed to the user. The pattern in the returned answers may be different from the search text in the sense that the returned documents will have the same sequence of stemmed words but these stemmed words may be separated by one or more stop words. Exact search is the only supported search technique which does not support the logical operators.

This means that when searching on the phrase "customer waiting", all answers that have a stemmed form of "customer" preceding a stemmed form of "wait" will be included in the search results, even if the stemmed words are not next to one another and separated by stop words such as "are" or "and".

If the phrase "exact search" is confusing to your staff and end-users, consider changing the message base or filter option label for this type of searching to indicate its function differently. For example, you could rename the Exact Phrase searching to be AND KEYWORDS.

Customer Portal:
Search Type field options are generally controlled by the filter options included within the report being used.  To change the options text, locate the report being used in the widget.  Edit the label(s) for the filters as needed within that report. Note: If a standard report is used, you will need to make a copy in order to edit the filter options and then update the widget with the new report ID.

Console:
The message base to edit is EXACT_PHRASE_LBL. This is visible from the 'Search Knowledgebase' option while editing incidents. Path to this setting is: Configuration > Site Configuration > Message Bases > search by Key. Save changes and refresh the report/page to confirm the change.

Note: Exact phrase searching is available when searching answer records -- either from the administration console or when searching answers on the end-user pages. Exact phrase searching is not available when searching incident records.