2008-03-17
lendog
In an exact match search request the search results snippets will highlight all substrings of the search word, not just word delimited occurances of the search string.
Example: Suppose I have a page that contains:
Elm Street ...
State Street ...
Congress Street ...
...
Shade Tree Commission ...
and search for "tree" (quotes or no quotes, doesn't matter). The search snippet will highlight all occurances of "tree" within "Street" in addition to "tree" within "Shade Tree Commission". If three or more substring hits occur before the bit of text containing "Tree", the text containing "Tree" will not even appear in the snippet.
This gives the appearance that the user asked for a wildcard search (*tree*), which is misleading. In fact, the actual search is working correctly. It's just that the resultant highlighting, in both snippet and displayed page, is showing more than the user asked for.