Words Too Short for searches

Gob · 07-07-2009, 09:29 PM

Why does it omit words from your search that are too short? Is it a technical issue, or just so you don't get a bunch of irrelevant results? If it's the latter, would it be possible to just omit short words that are really common, like and, the, a, etc? The reason I'm asking this is because I often have words that are essential to the search get omitted because they're too short. Thanks for reading.

***Boba Rhett*** · 07-07-2009, 09:59 PM

One of those words is Gob, isn't it. I know, it's like I'm a mind reader.

Gob · 07-07-2009, 10:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boba Rhett

One of those words is Gob, isn't it. I know, it's like I'm a mind reader.

Well, I do enjoy searching me... Wait, no, this is serious jizz! I DEMAND action! If that's OK with you, I mean...

***Boba Rhett*** · 07-07-2009, 10:17 PM

I'm pretty sure that even if we set it to three letters that we would be limited on the server side by Fulltext's own set limit. Short of modifying that, I suggest using a search engine's advanced parameter settings to search the site for words shorter than four letters.

Example using bing.com:

Type in: "site:www.lucasforums.com gob"

Without the quotes, mind you.

That should return all instances of your name being used in chronological order.

FYI, for google you would type in: "site:lucasforums.com intext:gob". I prefer this one.

Gob · 07-07-2009, 10:31 PM

Dirty. Thanks.

***stoffe*** · 07-08-2009, 06:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gob

Why does it omit words from your search that are too short? Is it a technical issue, or just so you don't get a bunch of irrelevant results? If it's the latter, would it be possible to just omit short words that are really common, like and, the, a, etc? The reason I'm asking this is because I often have words that are essential to the search get omitted because they're too short. Thanks for reading.

IIRC it has to do with indexing. To speed up searches the words in all the posts on the forums are indexed. To keep the size of the index from growing too large, negatively affecting performance, short words (shorter than 5 characters IIRC) are skipped. If there are some short words that are still of common interest to search for they can be added to an exceptions list to still be included though.