Boolean search that finds the people you meant

A Boolean search for University of Oxford returned 3,563 people. Two in five of them had studied there.

Whatever you typed into the Boolean box went to a single query over the whole profile as one block of text, which is why the box kept behaving in ways nobody asked for. Five separate faults, all of them measured against the live index of 251,036 people.

Fixes

• Operators: A lowercase or was thrown away as a stopword and the words joined with AND instead, so python or java returned 35,789 people rather than 128,135. A lowercase not did the opposite of what it says: python not java required java. Both now read as what they are, and python not java returns 55,234.

• Universities: University of Oxford matched anyone whose profile mentioned it anywhere. It now reads the schools people actually listed, so 3,563 results at 40% accuracy become 1,412 at 100%. X University, X Uni, Uni of X and the acronyms recruiters type (LSE, UCL, KCL, QMUL, MIT) all resolve to the same place.

• Job titles: Product Manager returned 138,961 people, 12% of whom held the title. It now returns 17,152, all of whom do. Quality Assurance went from 13,660 at 8% to 1,114 at 100%.

• Punctuation: C# and C++ were the same search, both returning 77,160. They now return 37,884 and 29,438. Curly quotes pasted in from a document were also ignored, so the phrase never ran as a phrase.

• Skills are left alone: Deliberately. Of 27,110 results for Kubernetes, 13,234 only mention it in their work history without ticking it as a skill, and those are real matches. Mentioning a skill is evidence you have it. Being named in someone else's job description is not evidence you held their title.

• Saved searches: The repair happens as the search runs, so saved searches and alerts improve without being re-saved. Expect lower counts wherever a search was matching more than it should. That is the fix rather than a regression, but it is worth knowing before the numbers move.