Steps to reproduce the issue

In Content > Categories, create a category structure with titles like this:

Root

• Category 1
• - News items
• - Blog items
• Category 2
• - News items
• - Blog items

Create some dummy articles in all categories.
Activate smart search and make sure that the contents is indexed.

Then in Components > Smart Search > Filters, try to create a filter that limits smart search to this category:

Category 1 > Blog items

Expected result

As with all functionality in Joomla where categories are involved, I would expect to see that all categories are listed individually, even if they have the same title. This may be visualised in different ways but in the end each category has it's own id so the title doesn't really matter.

Actual result

When trying to create a search filter based on categories, with the category structure as shown above, the categories are listed as:

• Blog items
• Category 1
• News items
• Category 2

When checking "Blog items" in the filter definition, a search action returns articles from both Category 1 > Blog items and Category 2 > Blog items.

System information (as much as possible)

J.3.4.4

Additional comments

You might argue that categories should never have identical names. Yet I never before encountered a situation in Joomla where this was a problem. I think that a category structure like this one is perfectly normal from the users' point of view.

It seems to me that the smart search indexing system regards the category as just another chunk of contents, rather than taking into account the special nature of the categories system.