Suorahaku

Suorahaku is a Finnish term used in information retrieval to describe a direct or exact-string search within a dataset, database, or search interface. The word combines suora (direct) and haku (search). In suorahaku, the user aims to locate occurrences of a precise sequence of characters rather than a broader concept.

In practice, suorahaku is often implemented so that text within quotation marks represents a phrase to be matched verbatim, with the words appearing contiguously in that exact order. It is typically contrasted with free-text or natural-language search, which tries to interpret intent and may include synonyms or related terms. It also differs from advanced query languages that use complex operators, wildcards, or regular expressions to express patterns.

Method and constraints: Users can frequently enforce exact-case matching, avoid stemming, and specify exact punctuation. Some systems require escaping of special characters to search for them literally. Performance and results depend on index design, whether indexing is case-sensitive, and how punctuation is treated.

Applications: Suorahaku is used in digital libraries, archives, enterprise search, code search, and other systems where precise string matches are important, for example when locating specific product SKUs, legal citations, or exact identifiers.

Limitations: It may yield lower recall for morphologically related forms or synonyms, and users must know the exact string they want to find. To improve results, suorahaku is often combined with other search modes, such as faceted or semantic search. See also: search engine, information retrieval, phrase search, exact-match search.