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[Resolved] Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2016 4:05 pm
by barbaz
These searches should not return zero results, but they do:
search.php?keywords=WOT&terms=all
search.php?keywords=msn.com&terms=all
Information

No suitable matches were found.
Works: search.php?keywords=html&terms=all


If try to search for a 2-letter word, e.g. search.php?keywords=ns&terms=all, this is what comes up:
Information

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: ns .
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 4 characters and must not contain more than 84 characters excluding wildcards.
(emphasis mine)
Something along those lines would have been a much more reasonable message to print out when searching for 3-letter "words".
People are seeing the "No suitable matches were found" and (reasonably) thinking it's saying there are no threads here about what they're searching for - and so they post new thread on already-discussed topic and someone on board staff has to go close it and point them to the right thread. Time is wasted on all sides.


Since there are many 3-letter words that are useful to search for, can the "word" size lower limit please be changed to 3 characters? Thanks!

Re: Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:04 pm
by therube
+1

Re: Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:23 am
by Thrawn
Or if that's too overwhelming, then the "at least 4 characters" error message should be displayed on 3-letter searches.

Re: Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 4:40 pm
by barbaz
Bump. I need to do a search for "NAS", and I'm not remembering any other keywords. And search engine isn't turning up the thread I'm looking for.

Re: Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2019 1:15 am
by barbaz
Thrawn wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:23 am Or if that's too overwhelming, then the "at least 4 characters" error message should be displayed on 3-letter searches.
Looks like this is the solution Giorgio chose to implement.

So 3-letter word searches are just going to require using an external search engine, e.g. DuckDuckGo, and adding site:forums.informaction.com to the query.

Re: [Resolved] Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:26 pm
by Mad_Man_Moon
If you really want to nail it you can also use the "intitle:NAS" or "inurl:cats" modifiers (the latter is probably less useful).

Perhaps using the speechmarks and a space ("intitle:"NAS "") to delimit is as a single word and avoid a thread about "nasty code" or something.

One could probably even narrow things down further with "-intitle:FIXED" or other typical operators used at IAF/here, if it helps you find more relevant results.

Of course, apologies if you guys here already knew this, but others reading may not. I'm purely posting it for info purposes only. :-)

This kind of stuff is really useful for getting proper results from searches on Google ¹. However I have noticed that as *soon* as I went back to BOOLEAN using that search engine with these terms ('properly', I'd argue) Google started asking me if I was real. iiiiiirrrroonnnnnyyyyyy :o 8-) :geek:

___________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes
¹ and particularly useful for filtering through less ... ... ... salubrious ... websites)

Re: [Resolved] Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:33 pm
by barbaz
Mad_Man_Moon wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:26 pm If you really want to nail it you can also use the "intitle:NAS"
Unfortunately this syntax does not work on this board. intitle:ABE doesn't show topics with "ABE" in the title, it only pulls up your post.

Re: [Resolved] Board search silently ignoring 3-letter "words"

Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2019 11:19 pm
by Mad_Man_Moon
barbaz wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:33 pm
Mad_Man_Moon wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:26 pm If you really want to nail it you can also use the "intitle:NAS"
Unfortunately this syntax does not work on this board. intitle:ABE doesn't show topics with "ABE" in the title, it only pulls up your post.
Ahhh, tits. Good point, I see that it only searches the first post title, the thread title, which, in essence, decides the 'title' of the pages that it's indexing. Cheers again, barbaz. :-)