Searching boards.ie -- annoyance

chewb

The minimum word size of 4 characters for searching baords.ie is too restrictive. It's impossible to search for things like: ppp, usb, dlink 604+ (for some reason the + is not counted, and hence the 604 is too small)

Thanks.

Michael Collins

Would the + be considered as a boolean operator?
I agree with chewb above, there are many things under 4 characters that you'd want to search for, i.e. "mp3 players" wouldn't be allowed, which is annoying.

KdjaCL

From my expericence everything i ever wanted to search for in Vbulletin has 3 letters.

It is annoying but not much can be done about it yet.

kdjac

Capt'n Midnight

would it be possible to use quoted spaces as in "TLA " or " TLA" or " TLA " ?

DeVore

I take your point (though what is wrong with "dlink"?)... the reason its restricted to 4 letters is an issue with the way Vbulletin does searching... its very labour intensive on the server and gets more and more so when you make the limit lower...

I doubt theres much we can do about it be done about it (wasnt there a workaround).

DeV.

DivX

What i usually use to get around this is to use a wildcard such as *

Example: ESB*

M.

chewb

Nothing wrong with dlink, but a search for
dlink 604+
fails because the 604+ is too short (the + is not counted)

The search limit seriously restricts the usefulness of the search facility... also these pages don't seem to be indexed very mush by google, so site searching with google doesn't return a lot

DivX

as i said above all you have to do is put an asterisk after or before your 3 characters, it does work..

phaxx

Originally posted by DivX
as i said above all you have to do is put an asterisk after or before your 3 characters, it does work..

In my experience it only works if it's part of another word, like: mp3* will match "mp3player" but not "mp3"

DivX

well when i do the odd search for bmw* on the motors forum, it returns results even if the * is a space.

chewb

Nope, when I search for say dlink 604* it only returns the threads that have something after the 604, like 604G. The * doesn't match spaces...

Peace

He has a point - TLA's are what we coputer nerds live by....

An aside - smart is sexy.

Syth

Perhaps there could be a list of acceptable three letter words such as DVD, mp3 etc. Thus when somewone enters a three letter word into the search box, it'll check if it's on the list, if not throw a hissy fit, if so then search for the three letter word.

It is a hindrance as there are some three letter words in common use that one would wnat to search for

DeVore

Its not about your search , its about the fncked up stupid way that VBulletin pre-chews the posts and indexes the words.... it keeps a huge list of unique words and which posts there are in. Making it 3 letters really isnt an option. I'll check with the lads again but I'm pretty sure it will kill a database our size.

Tried using * ... like "USB*" ?

DeV.

phaxx

Yeah, USB* matches "USB" plus some other characters, like USBpen, but not a space, "USB ".

Ste-

I have also encountered these problems before.
They have been fixed in the new vBulletin 3.
Any word on that DeVore ?