the Power of Search

[mikeonb4c]

Excellent tip. I often struggle on searches,
e.g. if you search for engine AND oil
many results don't have oil in the thread at all.. never understood why

The forum search ignores words that are 3 characters or less.

If you search for oil on it's own then you get no results.

If you search for oil leak even with all terms selected it will ignore oil and just search for leak

If you search for oil AND leak again it will ignore oil.

The only way I have found is to search for "oil leak" but then it needs to find the phrase.

Would be handy if there is a forum setting which could allow 3 letter searches. There are quite a lot of 3 letter words related to cars which you just can't search for:

oil
car
air
fan
ecu

etc

I agree. This characteristic of the BF Search engine has irritated me more than once

[g8dhe]

Both the minimum and the maximum character count can be changed, however, the index has to then be re-created .....
this can take a long time...
a board with 350 posts took 30seconds this board currently has 270131 so about 6 hours as a minimum I suspect, possibly 12-18 hours more likely!

[mikeonb4c]

Both the minimum and the maximum character count can be changed, however, the index has to then be re-created .....
this can take a long time...
a board with 350 posts took 30seconds this board currently has 270131 so about 6 hours as a minimum I suspect, possibly 12-18 hours more likely!

Jeebers what technology are we using! Useful facts and figures mind you!

[g8dhe]

Re-indexing databases is not done lightly on any technology when the database is of any size!

[Snail921]

oil+leak (rather than oil and leak) works
Regards,
Brian.

[g8dhe]

Now count the items (or pages of items) and repeat with just "leak" count again ....

[mikeonb4c]

Re-indexing databases is not done lightly on any technology when the database is of any size!

Takes me back to the old days when I designed database apps and was always looking for the best b-tree indexing engine. But of course search engines of the sort used on here must I guess be doing clever indexing of all words and their location in posts, which is a HUGELY more demanding exercise than the simple A-Z 0-999999 etc indexing of date fields like wot I wuz doing.

[Snail921]

My point was, Geoff, that it recognized oil despite the three character limit
Regards,
Brian.

[g8dhe]

Well not quite, what it does is search for "filter" but highlights both "oil" and "filter" so it will miss messages with just "oil" in them, but any that happen to have "oil" will be highlighted - hope that makes sense!

[mikeonb4c]

Well not quite, what it does is search for "filter" but highlights both "oil" and "filter" so it will miss messages with just "oil" in them, but any that happen to have "oil" will be highlighted - hope that makes sense!

for 'filter' read 'leak'?

[g8dhe]

Yes!