Request for allowing shorter search strings

Simon F

Simon F

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G'day All,
I just tried doing a search for GDC related topics and stumbled across the problem that the search engine won't accept strings that are short (presumably 3 letters or fewer).

Is there anything that can be done to relax this restriction because it seems a bit extreme? Could acronyms (eg expressed with capitals) be permitted?

TIA
 
Simon F said:
G'day All,
I just tried doing a search for GDC related topics and stumbled across the problem that the search engine won't accept strings that are short (presumably 3 letters or fewer).

Is there anything that can be done to relax this restriction because it seems a bit extreme? Could acronyms (eg expressed with capitals) be permitted?

TIA
Click to expand...

THANKS! I've tried to search for 2 and 3-letter words sometimes but it just wouldn't work! So annoying especially when i wanted to search for nAo (one of our best posters) or even ps3 mixed to whatever i was looking for.
 
I agree it's annoying there are so many 3 letters acronyms around that not being able to search for them is a pain sometimes !
 
I think it's all about server load. While minimum length could be 3, the database reindexed and badwords.php checked to not exclude terms we might search for, there is an increased processing overhead from doing so, and the indexes get much much bigger.

Wavey's mentioned it in the past I think, but I'm not sure what his stance on it these days is. Oh Pixellated One, what do you say?
 
how about indexing only certain 3 letter words/acronyms? I figure about 2 dozen would be more than enough.

epic
 
Well, the server has spent most of the day trying to build a new MySQL FULLTEXT index and we've changed the search capabilities over to that rather than the standard VBull search, only to find out that the MySQL FULLTEXT functionality doesn't support 3 letter searches either, and I'll be buggered if I'm going rebuild the other indexes again! Still, search should now be faster and its knocked a couple of hundred MB of the database, so it wasn't an entirely wasted effort.
 
Is this a test thread? Okay!

On the wings of life, by the hands of hope, by the brightest light from the brightest sun, crossing silent seas over mountains high to the valley of the damned! (blammo?)
 
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