Search Criteria

Would it be possible to reconfigure the search engine to allow searching on an alphanumeric strings less than 4 characters in length if used in conjunction with one over 4 characters?

For example the search “DAC†is currently invalid as is “Meridian DACâ€Â, my request would make the second search valid.

Is this useful? Just a thought

 

It's been requested before but it's a real bummer to implement.

The way the forum search system works (rougly) is that it maintains a database of words which link to a searchindex table so that searching is reasonably fast. Rebuilding the searchindex tables itself is a real bitch of a job (I did it the other day because something had gone pear shaped) but the real problem is that the size of the word and searchindex tables grows exponentially as you reduce the size of words indexed so going from 4 to 3 would make the tables MUCH bigger.

It is annoying though for the reasons you mention. I've been caught by the same problem a few times myself.

When I have some time I might try doing the re-indexing for 3 char words and see if it's managable from a space pov.

Michael.

 

Thanks for the reply, that sounds perfectly reasonable. Although as our leader a simple no would have also sufficed

As a thought could you not add a second table of keywords, containing numbers and acronyms (potential endless list) that only gets referenced when a search criteria contains a 3 or less alphanumerics in conjunction with a valid search request? Thus not degrading current search performance

 

That would be a question for the people who wrote the vBulletin software: www.vbulletin.com

There may well be users who've "hacked" in a feature like this (since it's all PHP it's easy to modify the code yourself) but I'd rather keep the board as close to standard as possible otherwise upgrading becomes a major nightmare!

Michael.

 

Looks like vBulletin version 3 (still in beta) has added a feature that lets you add a selected set of words outside the normal configured word length boundaries (min 4, max 20 at the moment here) which will be indexed.

Also, if you want to search on short words you can use Google to search the forum fairly effectively allthough it won't obviously have the most recent threads. Just add "site:www.zerogain.com" to your Google search criteria to limit the search to this site

Michael.