>Personally, for a lot of use cases I prefer exact string matches over BS stem indexing.
Really? I've worked on a few search projects in different spaces (venues (aka places/stores), source code, and products) in the past, and while exact string matches are often a good sign of quality, stemming and other analyzers make huge improvements in recall (and when measuring transaction volume in A/B testing strict string matching performed substantially worse). Certainly if you throw out the exact match signal (i.e. only index stemmed) I've seen that result in a deterioration of quality. What sort of data do you work with?
Really? I've worked on a few search projects in different spaces (venues (aka places/stores), source code, and products) in the past, and while exact string matches are often a good sign of quality, stemming and other analyzers make huge improvements in recall (and when measuring transaction volume in A/B testing strict string matching performed substantially worse). Certainly if you throw out the exact match signal (i.e. only index stemmed) I've seen that result in a deterioration of quality. What sort of data do you work with?