Minimum number of characters in a word to search on

greyster

I've noticed this problem has occured more often now when I am trying to search for a product/deal.

I can't do a search for small words like tom tom or i3 on the forums. It says the search is not big enough.

I can understand why this restriction has been implemented but perhaps its getting in the way of searches more than helping reduce ineffective searching ... straining the system.

A lot of people are reposting the same deals, news etc because they couldnt do a search to find that its already there.

Anyone else feel the same?

Binxy

Me too, although I understand it might be difficult/impossible to change

I've tried searching for Sky to get the freephone number, and DAB radios to name only 2, and of course they aren't long enough :rolleyes:

Edinburghlass_2

The search does leave a [STRIKE]lot[/STRIKE] bit to be desired but if you use * as a wild card like *sky it should bring up Sky and always remember not to use capital letters.

wirm

yeah I always use the * if its too small a word and it seems to work fine.

Binxy

Thanks for the tip - what does the * do? I always though that it was used to mean "there's something else after this word"

eg searching for cook* would bring up cooks, cooking, cooker etc (would you believe that's the best example of a word I could come up with :rolleyes: )

So what does searching for *sky mean, exactly, please?

sra

Binxy wrote:

Thanks for the tip - what does the * do? I always though that it was used to mean "there's something else after this word"

eg searching for cook* would bring up cooks, cooking, cooker etc (would you believe that's the best example of a word I could come up with :rolleyes: )

So what does searching for *sky mean, exactly, please?

You're right. The * is a wildcard and whould bring up partial words.
e.g. *sky would also bring up bluesky

However, it's also a loophole in the forum software in that you're now allowed to search for three letter words and yet it will return 3 letter word results as part of a wildcard search