@MartinSleziak Here I am! Thank you for opening this chat room and all your comments on my post, Martin. They are really good feedback to this project.

@MartinSleziak Yeah, using a chat room to exchange ideas and feedback makes a lot of sense compared to leaving comments in my post. BTW. Anyone finds a \oint\frac{1}{1-z^2}dz expression in old posts? Send to me and I will investigate why this issue occurs.

@MartinSleziak It is OK, don't feel anything bad. As long as there is a place that comes to people's mind if they want to report some issue on Approach0, I am willing to come to that place and discuss. I am really interested in pushing Approach0 forward.

And thank you! When you think Approach0 is stable and helpful enough (still some issue as we notice, but after some fine-tune in the future), please add links to these posts and let users know an alternative way to search MSE.

Hi @WeiZhong thanks for joining the room. I will write a bit more here when I have more time. For now two minor things.

I just want to make sure that you know that the answer on meta is community wiki. Which means that various users are invited to edit it, you can see from revision history who added what to the question.

For example, you now mentioned the thing about $\oint$. (The fifth bullet point.)

You can see in revision history that this bullet point was added by Workaholic: "I searched for \oint $\oint$, but I only got results related to \int $\int$. I tried for \oint \frac{dz}{1-z^2} $\oint \frac{dz}{1-z^2}$ which is an integral that appears quite often but it did not yield any correct results."

So if you want to make sure that this user is notified about your comments, you can simply add @Workaholic. Any of the editors can be pinged.

And I noticed also this about one of the quizzes (I did not check whether some of the other quizzes have similar problem.)

question I suppose that the quizzes are supposed to be chosen in such way that Approach0 indeed helps to find the question. I.e., each quiz was created with some specific question in mind, which should be among the search results. Is that correct?

I guess the quiz saying "Please list all positive integers $i,j,k$ such that $i^5 + j^6 = k^7$." was made with this question in mind: Find all positive integers satisfying: $x^5+y^6=z^7$.

However when I try the query from this quiz, I get completely different results.

To be more specific, on the first page of the results I have there questions:

1, 2, 3, 4,

5, 6, 7, 8,

9, 10

And not the question about $x^5+y^6=z^7$ I linked above.

question I vaguely recall that I tried some quizzes, including this one, and they worked. (By which I mean that the answer to the question from the quiz could be found among the search results.) So is this perhaps due to some changes that were made since then? Or is that simply because when I tried the quiz last time, less questions were indexed. (And now that question is still somewhere among the results, but further down.)

I was wondering whether to add the word bug to my last message, but it is probably not a bug. It is simply that search results are not exactly as I would expect.

My impression from the search results is that not only x, y, z are replaced by various variables, but also 5,6,7 are replaced by various numbers.

At least the highlighted parts show things like $x^2+y^2=z^2$ or $a^3+b^3=c^3$.

question I think that this implicitly contains a question whether when searching for $x^5+y^6=z^7$ also the questions containing $x^2+y^2=z^2$ or $a^3+b^3=c^3$ should be matches.

For the sake of completeness I will copy here the part of quiz list which is relevant to the quiz I mentioned above:

{ /* 4 */

"Q": "Please list all positive integers [imath]i,j,k[/imath] such that [imath]i^5 + j^6 = k^7[/imath]. ",

"hints": [

"This should be easy, the only thing I need to do is do some calculation...",

"I can use my computer to enumerate...",

"... (10 minutes after) ...",

"OK, I give up. Why borther list them <b>all</b>?",

"Is that possible to <a href=\"#\">search it</a> on Internet?"

],

"search": "all positive integers, $i^5 + j^6 = k^7$"

},

Hmm, I should have posted this as a single multiline message. But now I see that it is already too late to delete the above messages. Sorry for the duplication:

@MartinSleziak OK, I get it. So next time I would definitely reply to whom actually makes the revision.

@MartinSleziak Yes, remember the first time when we talk in a chat room? At that version of approach0, when a very limited posts have been indexed, you can actually get relevant posts on $i^5+j^6=k^7$. However, when I has enlarged the index (now almost the entire MSE), that piece of quiz (in fact, some quiz I selected earilier like [this one]()) does not find relevant posts anymore.

In order to investigate this problem, I am trying to find the original posts that you and me have seen (as you remember vaguely) which is relevant to $i^5+j^6=k^7$ quiz, if you find that post, please send me the URL.

@MartinSleziak It can be a bug, but I need to know if my index does contain a relevant post, so first let us find that post we think relevant. And I will have a look whether or not it is in my index, perhaps the crawler just missed that one. If it is in our index currently, then I should spend some time to find out the reason.

@MartinSleziak As for you last question, I need to illustrate it a little more. Approach0 will first find expressions that are structurally relevant to query. So $x^5+y^6=z^7$ will get you $x^2+y^2=z^2$ or $a^3+b^3=c^3$, because they (more specifically, their operator tree representation) are considered structurally identical.

After filtering out these structurally relevant expressions, Approach0 will evaluate their symbolic relevance degree with regarding to query expression. Suppose $x^5+y^6=z^7$ gives you $x^2+y^2=z^2$, $a^3+b^3=c^3$ and also $x^5+y^6=z^7$, expression $x^5+y^6=z^7$ will be ranked higher than $x^2+y^2=z^2$ and $a^3+b^3=c^3$, this is because $x^5+y^6=z^7$ has higher symbolic score (in fact, since it has identical symbol set to query, it has the highest possible symbolic score).

I am sorry, I should use "and" instead of "or". Let me repeat the message before previous one below:

As for you last question, I need to illustrate it a little more. Approach0 will first find expressions that are structurally relevant to query. So $x^5+y^6=z^7$ will get you both $x^2+y^2=z^2$ and $a^3+b^3=c^3$, because they (more specifically, their operator tree representation) are considered structurally identical.

2. Try to find the old post relevant to the $i^5+j^6=k^7$ quiz

Otherwise it is hard to know whether it is a bug or just because the crawler missed the post.

PS. by "\oint expression" I mean some old posts containing "\oint \frac{dz}{1-z^2}"

Unfortunately, I fail to find any relevant old post in neither case 1 nor case 2 after a few tries (using MSE default search). So the only thing I can do now is to do an "integrated test" (see the new code I have just pushed to Github: github.com/approach0/search-engine/commit/…)

An "integrated test" means I make a minimal index with a few specified math expressions and search a specified query, and see if the results is expected. For example, the test case tests/cases/math-rank/oint.txt specified the query $\oint \frac{dz}{1-z^2}$, and the entire index has just two expressions: $\oint \frac{dz}{1-z^2}$ and $\oint \frac{dx}{1-x^2}$, and the expected search result is both these two expressions are HIT (i.e. they should appear in search result)

and the ranking of them is $\oint \frac{dz}{1-z^2}$ ranked higher than $\oint \frac{dx}{1-x^2}$.

I have run the two newly-added test cases locally (in my computer) just now, they are all successfully passed. This means we can get what we want, but I cannot guarantee there is no bug. Since "integrated test" only has a minimal index, while approach0.xyz is running on a large index (entire MSE).

@WeiZhong I think it was the post I linked above:

BTW I did not find posts about \oint using google and built-in search either. (Although I did not spend too much time trying.)

@MartinSleziak Nice, I missed that message. Let me login to my server and find out if it is indexed. I will get back to you soon.

No need to hurry. It's not something urgent. :-)

And I will probably have to go AFK quite soon, anyway.

NP. I am also eager to know the reason. I will leave comment here to give you update.

For anyone interested, I post the screenshot of integrated test results here: imgur.com/a/xYBD5

BTW it is possible to link to a specific chat message, Wei Zhong.

For example like this: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32711761#32711761 You get the link by clicking on the little arrow next to the message and then clicking on "permalink".

I am mentioning this because (hypothetically) if Workaholic only sees your comment a few days later and then they come here to see what the message you refer to, they might have problem with finding it if there are plenty of newer messages.

However, this room does not have that much traffic, so very likely this is not going to be a problem in this specific case.

Another possible way to linke to a specific set of messages is to go to the transcript and then choose a specific day, like this: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/46148/2016/10/1

Or to bookmark a conversation. This can be done from the room menu on the right. This question on meta.SE even has some pictures.

This is also briefly mentioned in chat help: chat.stackexchange.com/faq#permalink

@MartinSleziak Good to learn this. I just posted another comment with permalink in that meta post for Workaholic to refer.

I just checked the index on server, yes, that post is indeed indexed. (for my own reference, docID = 249331)

So things could be more complicated than I thought. I need some time to investigate on this issue.

Update: I have fixed that quiz problem. See: approach0.xyz/search/…

That is not strictly a bug, it is because I put a restriction on the number of document to be searched in one posting list (not trying to be very technical). I have pushed my new code to GitHub (see commit github.com/approach0/search-engine/commit/…), this change gets rid of that restriction and now that relevant post is shown as the 2nd search result.

I am glad to see it works now. And I also have to say that you have solved the problem very fast.