3 letter word restrictions??? Yucky!!!

[Elgin Clock]

As brought up by Frank(Aflak) in the latest car thread, and being a problem I have run into before as well, I was wondering if you could change the letter limit in the "search" area to include 3 letter words or three digit numbers. I wanted to do a search for threads mentioning the number 237 (my team's number) and ran into a dead end. I think I understand the reasoning behind this way you approached and opted to program the search but It was really annoying when It kept giving me an error message every time I searched for 237. Arghh!!

If you could allow 1, 2, or 3 character searches only when those characters are numbers that would help out a lot. I doubt that someone will want to search for all threads that have say, the word, "I" or "Be" or "the" in them, but a person might be inclined to search for threads which include the team number like "1" or "27" or "237" in my case for instance. Even if they got a result for a discussion like a thread that had a sentence with the phrase, "...and 27 people came to this event..." It would still be no problem to weed through the bad search results.

It's easier to weed through results then have no information to search through at all!!!

[Brandon Martus]

Hint: use the '*' for wildcard.

Search for 237*

I'll lower it to 3 letters, though, and see what happens. I didn't write the search, or else I would've allowed a little more flexibility, like the ability to search for phrases

[Jack]

Brandon, do you know how vB handles searches? With phpBB, it uses two tables and then links 'key' words (words that aren't common like 'the', or 'that') to each post. This creates two HUGE tables (5,000 one and 33,000 rows the other) with ~900 posts.

[Brandon Martus]

I think its basically the same kind of system
Here are the tables used:

word -- 121,656 rows -- 8.9 MB
searchindex -- 2,553,167 rows -- 62.6 MB
search -- 2,320 rows -- 1.4 MB

word is where all the words are
searchindex is where all the associations are (ie: 'someword' => post 234098)
search is where the most recent searches are stored.

[Jack]

Yep. Gotta love the fact that the tables for searching are 7 times bigger than the posts themselves.

I don't think there's a better way besides getting rid of the search though. But, I wish there was.