Search not working

bigpanda

So it looks like the search keeps telling me that my search is too short. I think it's only picking up the first word I type regardless of the search terms and says that it's less than the 4 word minimum.

naporeon

bigpanda wrote: »

So it looks like the search keeps telling me that my search is too short. I think it's only picking up the first word I type regardless of the search terms and says that it's less than the 4 word minimum.

It's a four letter minimum.

JC of DI

Nap's right, and the four letter minimum does apply to every word you enter.

"Sheet of ice" won't work because both "of" and "ice" are under four letters, for example. "Sheet" would be just fine.

AndrewPaul

So, a game like "Far Cry 2" is unsearchable?

Thanatos

AndrewPaul wrote: »

So, a game like "Far Cry 2" is unsearchable?

Yes.

The search function is the most resource-intensive part of the forums. The fewer letters you have, the more resource-intensive it is. Our options are to have a usually-working forum with a four-letter minimum, or a forum that any user can bring to its knees for a few seconds with a search with a three-letter minimum. Which would you prefer?

LaOs

While the Search function actually has a four letter minimum, which I agree is necessary, the error message can be quite confusing (hence this thread):

The Search Error Message wrote:

The search term you specified (of) is under the minimum word length (4) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.

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

Emphasis mine. (I searched for "of mice and men" for this example.)

It should probably say:

One of the search terms you specified (of) is under the minimum character length (4) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.

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

bowen

Taken as a whole, a search that contains those words should do a search in regards to the exact phrase. Is the search also broken if I wanted to search for "In the house" as a complete phrase? Will it still claim I'm doing something wrong even though the search as a whole isn't really a forum killer unless it's broken down to the words themselves?

Smasher

An issue there is that people don't expect searches to transparently search for an exact phrase when they meant to simply look for a collection of words. The error message lets the user know what the problem is, instead of doing a different search that might return no results (thus giving the erroneous impression there aren't any posts with those words).

Willeth

Would it cripple the forums to have the search function simply ignore smaller words? Take this example from earlier today - I typed 'ps3 questions', looking for the thread of the same name. I then had to wait a minute before I could type 'playstation questions' and find it.

Now, while it wouldn't necessarily have helped me in this instance, would it not make sense to have it pop up the results for 'questions' and have a line of text saying 'the word "ps3" is too short'?

Ramius

t Willeth: I think it will rarely if ever be helpful to continue with the search without the bad words.

regarding phrase searches, I don't think vbulletin supports them, unfortunately. If I could, I would happily swap out the crippled and crippling vbulletin search for a dedicated search server like Sphinx, but that's not in the cards at this time.

Smasher

What would be helpful is for the cooldown not to trigger when there's a word that's too short, since the database (presumably) isn't being searched in that case.