FAQ: I can't search for short words ?

Sim

Administrator
There is a limit in what words are indexed by the search engine - currently this is set to ignore words of less than 4 letters. So you can search for "sale" but not for "buy". The primary reason for this is efficiency of the search engine and minimising the search index size.

Unfortunately, this means that you cannot effectively search for TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) or words like Tax, ATO, DHA, etc

I might play with the index setting to see how much bigger the index gets if I set it to 3 characters. Searches will be much slower too if I did. I test it and see.

If you actually want to search for a particular user (like "Sim" !!), you should notice that on the right hand side of the search page is a "Search by User Name" field... use this ! The search by user name does not have the same size limitations, as it is not searching the index - but doing direct database lookups. So don't worry, you can still search for posts by Sim ! ;)

There are other ways of doing this too. Just under every post is a "search" button, which allows you to find more posts by the person who posted.

Also, by going to the "members" page, you can search for a list members, and then find posts by that particular member.
 
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