Search Suggestion

[Big Dawg]

I have a suggeston... When doing a forum search using only two letters or characters, I get the following message:



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vBulletin Message

The search term you specified (70) is under the minimum word length (3) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.

If this term contains a wildcard, please make this term more specific.

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I ran into this twice last night. Once I was trying to find references to "XM Radio" and the other was "Dana 70"



There is probably some reason the search is set up this way that I am not aware of.



Anyway, I really enjoy this sight. Keep up the good work.

 

[KatDiesel]

use the *



Dana 70*

XM* radio



its not "perfect" but it helps.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

The problem is the size of the search table. In the past the limit was set to 4 characters and there were problems with the servers crashing at that level. We have since greatly upgraded the servers and now have it set at 3 characters. As it is now the search table is 20MB in size where the post table is 198MB in size. If we set the limit at 2 characters nearly everything would be in the search table and it would actually be larger than the post table. That would increase the server load exponentially and I'm concerned that it would start giving us problems. I've looked around at over vBulletin sites and the majority that are as large as us have their limit set at 4 characters (which was a big problem here because we have lots of 3 character things we want to search for) and I haven't found any our size that have their limit set at 2 characters.



BTW, using wildcards will not work on two character searches either. For example a search on 70* would bring up 701, 702, 703, 704, 70a, etc but would not find 70 - because two character words simply aren't in the search table.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[Big Dawg]

I knew that there was probably a reason that it was set up this way. Now I know. Thanks for the quick replies.