Product Suggestion: Search for a phrase instead of individual words

[ScottWorld]

It would be great if the Search Block would let us search for entire phrases in our database, instead of breaking up the phrase into individual words.

For example, if we wanted to search for this phrase:

“cat on a hot tin roof”

Airtable’s Search Block would return ALL the records that have ANY of those words:

cat
on
a
hot
tin
roof

But we only want to return the records that have the ENTIRE phrase.

This is typically done in other database languages by putting quotation marks around the phrase. But using quotation marks in the Search Block doesn’t change its behavior.

Interestingly enough, using the “Find in View” feature on the grid view actually DOES respect entire phrases, but that just highlights all the matching phrases within your view, so you have to scroll up & down through all of your records to see your matching results. This would be very difficult to do with thousands of records.

Thanks! 🙂

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

But using quotation marks in the Search Block doesn’t change its behavior.

That’s because, Airtable search appears to remove all quotation marks and stop-words from your query string. Until such time as they modify the underlying architecture, they will be unable to support this idea. Indeed, there are many special characters that are ignored including &&, ||, parens, and other common nomenclatures we have all become accustomed to using since the advent of Google Search in the late 90’s.

I would +1 this feature request if it were not for the many other aspects of search that need to be remedied. Addressing this - and only this - would likely create even more search-related dissatisfaction.