element-hq / element-hq/element-meta

Search in E2EE rooms does not stem despite seshat stemming functionality

Open
#2,097 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
T-Enhancement
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
112
Forks
26
Avg merge
6h 6m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

### Your use case

A user searching for a singular ("book") will get results that include the plural ("books") using server-side FTS search in an unencrypted room.

The same search in an encrypted room on Element Desktop (sechat) does not return plurals.

It appears that Element is attempting to leverage sechat stemming (per [this line](https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat/blob/fdcd126a4faf05ae29db9883203c288d6611b5ff/src/index/mod.rs#L427) of code) but it's not working. Searches for "book" do not return "books," "booking," etc.

There is an open bug in seshat but the repo seems nearly dead -- last commit to main was about half a year ago.

Hoping someone on the Element side can take a look at this and see if there is a simple fix to properly use seshat stemming.

This is related to https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/1479 and https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/14018.

### Have you considered any alternatives?

_No response_

### Additional context

_No response_

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start with the seshat stemming reference at src/index/mod.rs#L427 and compare it with the Element Desktop search behavior described here. Reproduce searches for “book” and verify whether encrypted-room results include “books” and “booking”; use the related issues for context before deciding what is actionable on the Element side.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
desktop, search, security
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.