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

[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!

[therube]

+1

[Thrawn]

Or if that's too overwhelming, then the "at least 4 characters" error message should be displayed on 3-letter searches.

[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.

[barbaz]

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.

[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

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

[barbaz]

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.

[Mad_Man_Moon]

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.