Filing a bug does not detect existing bug with near-exact matching title

[Matt Giuca]

When reporting a bug, the automatic search to tell you if bugs with similar names already exist sometimes does not return any matching results, despite searching for a near-exact string.

I just filed a bug on the "ivle" project which turned out to be a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ivle/+bug/610281, titled "Tutor policy should be per-offering".

I typed in "Tutor policy decisions should be per-subject" as a new bug against IVLE (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ivle/+filebug) and it said "No similar bug reports were found", despite the fact that the strings are almost a precise match, with four matching words. In fact, typing "Tutor policy decisions should be per-offering" does not find any matches, despite being an identical title except for the additional word "decisions".

However, typing "Tutor policy decisions should be per subject" or "Tutor policy decisions should be per offering" (without the hyphen) does find a match. The hyphen is messing up the search, but there is no reason this should be so: firstly because in the latter example, the exact word "per-offering" is in the existing bug title, and secondly because there are four other matching words.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Indeed, we want to improve this substantially. However the prior implementation had the downside of not completing in a reasonable time. We will be overhauling our search engine in the future and get to bugs like this at that point.