I have tried this in two different groups that I moderate. 

Thanks. ~Mike

I have verified it in my group. Very strange. Joanie

I did a download on the members and searched through the csv file for the string tom and got no hits. So there is nothing in the data that would trigger this search. Searching for the string "com" brings up everyone in my group because emails all end in ".com". I'm trying to remember my Linux regular expression stuff but "tom" is nothing more than a search for the string "tom". It's weird that it's almost half the members. Same was true on mine but it was closer to 40%. Joanie

On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 08:45 PM, Joanie wrote:

I have verified it in my group. Very strange.

I have just done the same in 2 groups; one of 1977 members and another of 43. The first produced 740 returns and the second 17.

What is perhaps even weirder is that these represent 37.4% and 39.5% of the respective memberships, which, while not the same, are remarkably similar.

Chris

Try Tom*.

I do quite a lot of searches in one of my groups for TV model numbers.
I always have to add a * wildcard at the end as quite often extra
characters are at the end, eg 21AX2100EZ may only show if you use
21AX2100*

Davw

On 26 Jan 2021 at 21:02, Mike Hanauer via groups.io wrote:

I have often found "weidness" in search results which I could not
explain. The search for "tom" is the wildest, but the cause of its
returning so many false positives may explain others. Consider Better,
not Bigger. So many advantages. Just ask. USA adds a Chicago to our
overpop each year. "Still more population growth is not our way to a
healthy community, a healthy planet, OR enjoyable cycling."

http://davesergeant.com

On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 03:21 PM, Dave Sergeant wrote:

Try Tom*.

While that will work for Display names, it doesn't include email addresses.  Unless/until Mark has a chance to figure out what's going on, try including the search term in quotes - "tom".

It also seems to be related to the length of the search string.  While tom and toms have problems, david seems to work fine, but 5 letter searches don't unless they have a space on both ends.

Without quotes, it appears to be looking for the characters in the sequence given in the search.  Looking for tom also finds all of the hoTmail.cOM addresses, but there are others that don't fit that mold.  Maybe it's those characters in any order?

Duane

Sarah,

What a great find. I tried "som" and it found all that have an "s" anywhere in the email and end in "om". It did not pick up on a name with s in it.

Then I tried "pam" to find "Paige" and ending in "m" but that did not find anything. "pa" was not in the email address.

The I tried including the quotes literally ("tom") and that did not find anything where as without the quotes found numerous ones.

Not sure what the search rules are. Someone mentioned a wild card character of *

Joanie

A quick test on one of my groups found lots on searching for tom (t anywhere, including only after the @ (e.g. in hotmail.com), with ~om at end, or matching *o*omot*@*.*o.* (changing all other characters to single *); but only a few for jom , only finding adresses starting jo~ and ending .com (but not starting  jp~, or starting jo~ with m  in a different place). Curious. 

Searching for som and pom (in same group) only found four (each) - with ~so~ or ~po~ in address, and ending ~om. At first glance, a seemingly random selection...

Another curiosity: if on subsequent screenfulls (i.e. not first) of my search for tom (found >100), I change search argument to jom, and press enter (to search), it say is giving me 1 to 7 of 7 (that it normally does for that search), but does not display any of them, until  I click a column header to sort them.

jeremy

Jeremy,

The lack of displaying the information is a new bug. We should probably keep this topic focused on the search issue only.

Why don't you start a new topic for the failure to display the search information. Very interesting but it makes for confusion in a defect reporting and bug fixing. We can all help narrow it down in the new topic.

Hugs,

Joanie

On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 04:56 PM, Duane wrote:

Without quotes, it appears to be looking for the characters in the sequence given in the search.  Looking for tom also finds all of the hoTmail.cOM addresses, but there are others that don't fit that mold.  Maybe it's those characters in any order?

It does looks like it's looking for *T*O*M*, (not *TOM*), in that order, but anywhere in the text (addy+domain), and only for email addresses:  I tried it on a 5-member test group, and it only returned one: amdTemp...@...OM, the only one who fits the pattern.  I then added the text tom to a different member's profile name and while it (correctly this time) picked that one up as well, changing it to toam or taom did not catch it now.  So it only does it in the email address field, and since .com is omnipresent, it only takes just one more letter-matching to return that many "matches".

Cheers,
Christos

On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 08:51 PM, Dan Tucker - FireTuck wrote:

I wonder if there’s something in the membership group or subgroup name that’s being found.

Check out last year's discussion on membership searches as it may provide more info.

Andy

New topic started as suggeste - awaiting approval.

Jeremy

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 04:00 PM, Mike Hanauer wrote:

I have never been able to find a search feature within help.

For this you select the "single page" version of the help file, then use your browser search/find function, often CTRL+F.  If you have the pdf version, just use the search in the reader (also CTRL+F in Acrobat.)

Duane