Working with Results

.search(query) returns a SearchResult:

type SearchResult = {
	query: string;
	matched: boolean;
	best: SearchMatch | null;
	matches: SearchMatch[];
	byAlgorithm: Record<string, AlgorithmMatch[]>;
	ranAlgorithms: string[];
};

query

The query string, echoed back verbatim so you can tell what produced a result once it has been passed somewhere else.

matched and best

matched is true when at least one algorithm produced at least one match. best is the single highest-confidence match across every algorithm that ran, or null when nothing matched. Ties resolve to whichever match was pushed first, which follows run order and then dataset order — best is found with a strict > comparison, so the first match at the top confidence wins over a later one that ties it.

matches

Every match from every algorithm that ran, flattened into one array, each tagged with the algorithm that produced it:

type SearchMatch = AlgorithmMatch & { algorithm: string };

type AlgorithmMatch = {
	index: number;        // index of the matching entry in the dataset
	confidence: number;   // 0 through 1
	candidate: string;    // the dataset entry that matched, verbatim
	position?: number;    // offset inside the candidate, for positional algorithms
};

position is only present when the algorithm that produced the match sets it: substring, prefix, KMP and Boyer-Moore report it because it is meaningful for them; edit-distance and n-gram algorithms do not. The order of matches is run order first, then dataset order within each algorithm’s own contribution.

byAlgorithm

The same matches grouped by algorithm name, without the algorithm tag (each entry is an AlgorithmMatch, not a SearchMatch, since the key already says which algorithm it is):

result.byAlgorithm.kmp;              // KMP's matches only
result.byAlgorithm["normalized-naive"]; // bracket access for hyphenated names

Every algorithm that ran has an entry here, even if it found nothing: an algorithm that ran and matched zero rows maps to []. An algorithm that never ran because the run order excluded it, or because stop-on-match ended the pipeline before reaching it, has no key at all.

ranAlgorithms

The list of algorithms that actually ran, in the order they ran. This equals the run order for a find-all pipeline, and is shorter than it whenever stop-on-match ended the pipeline early: the difference between ranAlgorithms and the run order you passed to .runOrder() is exactly how far the pipeline got before it stopped.

const result = search.defineBehavior("stop-on-match").search("iPad Mini");
result.ranAlgorithms; // e.g. ["naive"] — the rest never ran