Puzzling results

[i9uq9p702]

New user of FARR.          

When I type mbna the top two entries that come up are :

Name	Score	Location
IrfanView - Thumbnails.lnk	878	C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\StartMenu\Programs\IrfanView
mbna.rfp	862	K:\XXXXXXX\YYYYY

I don't understand how Irfan can beat mbna.rfp. I have tried looking at the scoring options and have come up with:

	IrfanView	mbna.rfp
Search Folders
%MYSTARTMENU%	100
K:\XXXXXXX (Subdirectory depth = -1)		100
Heuristic Scoring
History bonus (both are listed in my history)	200	200
Exact match		100
Leftmost bonus		150
Percentage of Search String		25 (??)
Whitespace Removal	0	0
(The other entries are not explained in the Help file and I can't work out how to use them.)
Pattern Scoring
*.rfp		100
*.lnk	50
Total	350	675

These scores, although obviously only part of the story, are so heavily in favour of mbna.rfp (which is what I want) and yet it comes up second. Please could someone help me understand
i) the other entries in the Heuristic Scoring options
ii) what other tests are affecting the scores.

Thank-you.

(The Help file is badly out of date in many ways - the screen prints are of a previous version and some new features, such as the extra heuristic scoring options, that have been added to the application have not been added to the Help.  This makes it very difficult for a new user such as myself to make the most of what is obviously a very powerful program.)

[mouser]

Hi i9uq9p702.

That is a hard name to pronounce!! 

First, thanks for the cool post.. it's very cool to see someone breaking down the scores like this -- almost like a detective trying to solve a mystery.

The irfanview shortcut is exciting FARR because of this substring:
IrfanView - Thumbnails.lnk

Now ideally, and clearly, your mbna.rfp should have won with a highest score.. 99 times out of 100 farr would be smart enough to rank it on top.  Initially i thought the history might be what is causing it, but you said already both are in history.

I have an idea.. could you try disabling the non-contiguous search option and see if that lowers the score:


If it is that, then its a bug in that.  If it's not that then maybe i will try to reproduce it.

[i9uq9p702]

Hi, Mouser,

Thanks for your welcome to the board and your kind comments on my first post.

Yes, I noticed that IrfanView - Thumbnails.lnk includes the substring mbna, so I wasn't surprised that it appeared, just that it appeared at the top.

I already had the non-contiguous search option disabled.

If you could reproduce my problem that would be cool. 

Thank-you for your help.

[czb]

Just a note. I did reproduce your problem with the same result.
mouser: I would suggest to make an option to display summation procedure (like 50+200+...). Then it would be clear why this happens.

[i9uq9p702]

czb : Thanks for taking the time to reproduce my problem.

mouser : As my non-contiguous search option was already disabled, I tried enabling it.  The scores for the two items in question didn't change.
Do you think you will be able to look into this for me or is it not high enough on your list of things to do?

[mouser]

i will look into it.. clearly it does not seem desirable.

[i9uq9p702]

Thank-you.

[mouser]

i've tried to reproduce and found in my tests that the irfanview is getting a big boost from matching the *.exe filter (i know its a link, but its a lnk to a .exe), which would suggest that you should boost up the rfp score, reduce the exe, or increase the leftmost bonus.

i also noted that the leftmost bonus score is being used to give slight bumps based on a few other heuristics, and i'm trying to tweak those to not give as much of a bonus in this kind of case -- since the other heuristics i added really are meant to come into play only with multiword searches.

[i9uq9p702]

Thanks. I hadn't realised that a .lnk gets its target's score, as well as its own.

I have done a quick test to confirm this :

* uncheck the "Remove duplicate links to same target" option
* set %MYSTARTMENU% and %PROGRAMFILES% to the same score
* type the leftmost few letters of an executable name

The .lnk appeared above the .exe in the results list and the difference in scores confirms what you said.

Thank-you for looking at this, mouser.