Wildcards/Searching

[ProMac1K]

I understand that a wildcard is to reduce the server load while searching. Just wondering if we can still add some more searches to the list that we made, without having to use a wildcard, or not being able to search even with a wildcard. I don't remember what was all in the list me made of two-digit terms, nor do I know if the list is displayed somewhere on the site. It would be nice to be able to use years like i. e "97 and "02". Also numbers for things like "6 Speed" and "6 Plate". I'm wondering if this is a lot to ask? It wouldn't be so much of a load if we didn't just type in "02" in the search box. I'll even admit some searches I do turn up the max amount of threads, sometimes I just go back and refine my search to make a smaller amount of results. Am I asking something that I shouldn't?



-Trever

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It doesn't have anything to do with wildcards - as a matter of fact using a wild card in a search would increase the load on the file server. The way vBulletin works is there is a seperate database for searching which has a record for every word that is searchable. Right now there are 23,779,653 records in that database. All words over 3 characters are in there except for words like "and", "the", etc. Anything under 3 characters we need to add manually. Currently we have in there "16 17 18 20 53 aa ac at b1 bd cb dc dd eb ez fp h2 ho hx hy lp o2 qc so vp ve". I'm hesitant to add additional words to that because searches add a significant load to the server. Most vBulletin boards of our size are turning their search features off or limiting their size by reducing the length of time that you can search back or increasing the character limit to 4 characters, etc. I definately don't want to add anything right now until I have our current traffic levels completely under control from a server load standpoint. Also, anything I add at this point will only go forward from that point - it will not go retroactive to all past posts. The only way to do that would be to completely rebuild the search index which would take about 2 weeks of solid crunching to accomplish - and with our current load would cause extremely slow performance for the users. I will file this away for possible future consideration.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Bad news - with the changes I had to make to the search engine two character searches will most likely not be able to be done any longer. The size of our database has grown so large that it simply can't be supported. I had to completely throw out the vBulletin search engine and use mysql queries alone to do the searches. Thus far it is making a HUGE difference in performance. Once this runs for a while and I know it's working well I will dig further to see if there's any way that I can enable some two character searches but I doubt that it will be possible because of the way it runs.

 

[ProMac1K]

No problem. I, too, can tell the difference already. I really forgot all of the two character searches that we could use anyways.



Thanks for your kindness and commitment!