Bug #81261 Unclear statement in fulltext search documentation
Submitted: 1 May 2016 19:01 Modified: 16 Jun 2016 14:14
Reporter: teo teo Email Updates:
Status: Closed Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Server: Documentation Severity:S1 (Critical)
Version: OS:Any
Assigned to: CPU Architecture:Any

[1 May 2016 19:01] teo teo 
Description:
At https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/fulltext-natural-language.html

This sentence is so unclear that it's hard to make any sense of it:

"Relevance is computed based on the number of words IN THE ROW, the number of unique words in that ROW, the total number of words IN THE COLLECTION, and the number of documents (rows) that contain a particular word."

What's the difference between "words in the row" and "words in the collection"?? Do words in other columns, not belonging to the collection (i.e. the fulltext index), and hence totally irrelevant to the matching, have any effect on the relevance? I don't think so. I definitely hope not.

So, maybe here the word "row" is incorrectly used to mean the "search string"?? 

How to repeat:
..........
[2 May 2016 9:46] MySQL Verification Team 
Hello Teo,

Thank you for the report!

Thanks,
Umesh
[16 Jun 2016 14:14] Daniel Price 
Posted by developer:
 
The referenced pages has been updated as follows:

"Relevance is computed based on the number of words in the row (document),
the number of unique words in the row, the total number of words in the
collection, and the number of rows that contain a particular word.

Note: The term document may be used interchangeably with the term
row, and both terms refer to the indexed part of the row. The term
collection refers to the indexed columns and encompasses all rows."