Getting 500 Error on certain words

Yeah, it’s a question of word getting too many results, which causes problems.

Have you already checked the “Throttle searches” option on the Searching tab of Relevanssi settings? If not, do that, and that should fix this issue.

Hi,

I’m sorting results by date, and so “throttle searches” is disabled.

Well, in that case I would recommend switching from Relevanssi to a more robust search solution. As you can see, Relevanssi can’t function without the throttle on such a big database.

There are plenty of options that offer better performance: Swiftype, Addsearch, Elastic, LucidWorks Site Search and so on. Anything that has a separate server for the search should be fine.

Of course, that performance comes with a price: Swiftype is $199 / month, Addsearch is $79 / month and so on.

Or you can start using the throttle. It will reduce the results to 500 per search term and thus won’t show all results and won’t necessarily keep the most recent posts, but on the other hand, if the search term returns over 11000 posts, I don’t think anyone’s going to go through all of those in any case –?at that point the searcher should introduce more keywords to narrow down the search anyway.

Hi,

but on the other hand, if the search term returns over 11000 posts, I don’t think anyone’s going to go through all of those in any case – at that point the searcher should introduce more keywords to narrow down the search anyway

Of course a user would add additional key words, but the problem is adding additional key words to narrow the results doesn’t work. If the search includes keyword(s) that fail, additional keywords don’t help and the search still fails even though it’s a narrower search.

For example, if I add “indonesia” (which occurs 116 times by itself), to the above 2 word search (that doesn’t work … “aga khan”), to narrow down the search, it should just return 101 posts (according to the WordPress Admin Posts search), but this more narrow search, with the additional keywords, doesn’t work either:

https://ismailidigest.org/?s=aga+khan+indonesia

Or, if I add use “Yogyakarta” instead (which should return just 9 posts), it still doesn’t work:

https://ismailidigest.org/?s=aga+khan+Yogyakarta

The stranger thing is that the word “Aga” appears in 6647 posts (according to stop-words count) and the word “Khan” in 6996 posts (according to stop-words count). However, these keywords don’t fail when searched on their own, but fail when used together as “aga khan” (which should narrow the results).

Similarly, other words like “finder” which occurs in 10,003 posts (according to stop-words count) doesn’t fail on its own, but does when used with “aga” (as in “aga finder”).

So in these cases the single words are working but the narrower search with more keywords is not!

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by NanoWisdoms.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by NanoWisdoms.

If your default operator is OR, adding new words will expand the query. If you are using AND, new words will narrow it. So make sure your default operator is set to AND.

The default operator is AND, and OR fall back is disabled.

Hmm, checking your site, it sure looks like AND searches to me. Searching for “Khushiali Jamatkhana” finds fewer results than just “Khushiali” or “Jamathkana”.

I think the issue may be caused by those words just being too popular, so that AND search is not really helping.

Use the throttle, that would help with this.

Something is not making sense to me.

“aga” works (7307 published posts according to WordPress Admin search):
https://ismailidigest.org/?s=aga

“finder” works (9,532 published posts according to WordPress Admin search):
https://ismailidigest.org/?s=finder

BUT “aga finder” does not work (6,658 published posts according to WordPress Admin search):
https://ismailidigest.org/?s=aga+finder

How can these words be “too popular” when they work on their own but not together?

I am unable to report how many posts Relevannsi has for these words, because after I put some stop words, it is no longer recommending stop words.

Combining words can be heavier than individual words, because in multiword searches Relevanssi has to keep in memory all the results found with “aga” and all the results found with “finder”, even if the combination of both would find fewer results.

But I really can’t help you further with this. Either use the throttle, or switch to a more robust search tool. With common search terms finding thousands of posts, Relevanssi is not a very good option. Something more robust would be better for you.