Automattic / Automattic/pocket-casts-android

Too few keywords cause podcast searches to fail (especially in Chinese)

Open
#4,221 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
[Area] Search Enhancement
Dominant language
Kotlin
Stars
2.8k
Forks
308
Avg merge
1d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
143

Description

### Description

I found that when searching for episodes within the podcast, too few characters will render the search ineffective.
I tested it, and it seems that the search only works properly when there are 3 or more characters. If there are 2 or 1 character, the search does not work.
This may not affect English or other languages, but it causes some issues in Chinese.

**Since common phrases and keywords in Chinese are often 1 or 2 characters long, and one Chinese character typically corresponds to one English word, this results in the internal search function frequently failing when using Chinese.**

I hope this can be improved to make it more convenient and user-friendly for Chinese users. Thank you!

### Screenshots or screen recording

| 2 Words No Work | 3 Words Can Work |
| --- | --- |
| Image | Image |
| Image | Image |

### Did you search for existing list?

- [x] I have searched for existing issues.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No files or tests are named in the issue. Reproduce podcast searches using one- and two-character Chinese keywords, then locate the podcast search entry point and its minimum-query handling. Done means one- and two-character Chinese searches return effective results without regressing longer searches.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
kotlin
Domain
mobile-dev, search
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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