Search function

[Crystal]

Hi everyone,
When I tried to do a search on "land tax" I got the following message...

vBulletin Message
The search term you specified (tax) is under the minimum word length (4) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.

Lengthening the word tax to taxation doesn't seem to be appropriate. How should I proceed?

Thanks for your help,
Crystal

 

[geoffw]

I think this was raised before- with the same keyword.

I tried to find the post using search, but I could not

I can see reasons why a common search word could hit the server hard. But if searches were allowed three letter words, but having a stop list of common words which would always be excluded from the search, there would not be too much of a performance hit.

Just something for the wish list.

 

[Jas]

if you can do a specific charater search, maybe try " tax" (four charaters with the space. How bout *tax, or ?tax. Both "*" and "?" are wildcards, so if the program has a wildcard search, by putting it in front, you'll get a responce for tax. At least, I can't think of a word that has tax on the end...

Jas

 

[asy]

Originally posted by jas
At least, I can't think of a word that has tax on the end...

Ooooh, I love Puzzles:

Syntax
Detax
Retax
Untax
Pretax
Pentax
Antitax
Polltax


Thanks Jas!!!

hehe

asy

 

[Sim]

Brilliant... thanks jas - I had forgotten about the wildcards in searches

 

[geoffw]

Asy,

You forgot a few important ones..

snack attax
fat attax

(but not fair syntax... that's a government charge on houses of ill repute)

 

[Jas]

*sigh*

I knew I was asking for trouble with that one....



Jas

 

[Adam]

So what about the suggestion that geoffw made of allowing 3 letter searches, but now allowing certain keywords??

 

[Sim]

The problem is not so much the extra traffic from the common search terms, it is the size of the index as well.

Currently, the database table with all the post data in it is 27MB in size - but the search index table is already 34MB !

If we were to increase the search index to include 3 letter words, it would probably triple in size.

These may sound like small sizes at the moment, but I expect them to grow significantly as the forum grows... I have heard of vBulletin forums with databases over 1GB in size !!!!!!!!!

 

[Les]

G'day Sim',


Is there a case for allowing a "restricted" number of 3-letter words (or is this not possible?). As Crystal has pointed out, "tax" is one of those common (on these forums) 3-letter words that REALLY SHOULD be searchable.


Can a limited (index?) number of 3-letter words be included in the search?


Regards,

 

[Sim]

No this is not a realistic thing to try and do from a technical point of view.

Anyway, by using wildcards we can achieve the same result for those words we really must search for.