Search engine not as good as before since last update

[koenigs]

Hello,

I recently updated my Pleco to version 3.2.52 but now I have a problem with the search engine.

Let's say the selected dictionary for the search engine is on "All Chinese Dicts" (Blue C on white background).

1) I'm searching for "xiao", everything is fine, I get the Chinese characters list I was waiting for.
2) I'm now searching for "computer". The search engine automatically switches to "All English Dicts" (Blue E on white background). This is already bad because even though the results are relevant to my keyword, the results list isn't as good as if "Full-text, Chn Dicts" (White E on blue background) was selected.
3) Also now if I search another Pinyin word (for example "xiao" again), the Dictionary group automatically selected is "Full-text, Chn Dicts" (White E on blue background) which is bad. It doesn't even show "小" in the results. Instead "All Chinese Dicts" (Blue C on white background) should be selected.

Now because of this new behavior in the app, I'm constantly tapping this dictionary icon next to the search box. I'm losing quite some time because often I'm not finding the results I'm looking for and then I remember that's because the good dictionary hasn't been properly detected.

I never had any issue before and never changed the settings in the dictionary section in the past.

After this brand new behavior appeared I started playing with all the settings with dictionaries and dictionary groups without any success to get it back how it was working before.
I finally reset all my settings but still the same so I came to the conclusion it was a bug in the recent update.

I don't want to reinstall the app because I exported my flashcards for my friends but they told me they weren't able to import them because the Database was corrupted. So I'm scared to lose all my flashcards if I reinstall the app.

Thanks for your help.
This search issue bothers me...

 

[mikelove]

Try deleting whatever English-Chinese dictionary add-ons you've installed ("Add-ons" / Installed) - my guess would be that you purchased but didn't install those before (which is why you weren't seeing that other search group) but that recently in the course of reinstalling or updating something you clicked 'yes' when Pleco offered to download your missing purchases and so it downloaded those along with that. We haven't changed anything at all related to this in quite a while, so it's very unlikely this behavior change would come from the update itself.

You could also try going into Settings / Search Engine and setting 'dictionary search order' to 'current only' - that way it'll never switch between dictionary groups unless you tell it to.

That 'xiao' bit is happening because you had just searched for an English word and so when Pleco found there were both English and Chinese matches for 'xiao' it defaulted to the language you had last searched in; it's worked that way for literally about a decade now. If you enter a tone number after your pinyin search that will always force it to use pinyin.

Also, I would gently encourage you to try using "All English Dicts" a bit more - you may like the way the full-text results are presented better, but the results from dedicated E-C dictionaries are really of much higher quality + much more likely to offer a relevant / current Chinese term for your search.

 

[Bvo]

I learned from experience that manual search group selection is far better than autoswitching.
You just need to know that Pleco has 6 main search modes/groups - that's all.
With manual search you will get exactly what you're looking for and all information Pleco's dictionaries have - no missed or hidden data, which is possible with autoswitching.