Suggestion: Allow 3 character Searches [Merged]

chartreuse_2

Hi all and thanks for an incredibly useful site. Just to prove that you can't please all of the people all of the time, I have a polite request. I seached to see if it had been discussed before but didn't find the exact topic.

Now, I understand that the 4 character search string limitation is part of vBulletin. However, we use a lot of 2 or 3 character acronyms here (eg PPI, RBS, SIM, 02 etc etc) and it would be great to be able to search on them.

So, I know that some members are also aware of https://www.flyertalk.com. That site has similar issues (airline codes such as AA, BA, US and airport codes like LHR, LGW, NCL). Somehow the admins there managed (before their recent upgrade to a newer version) to create a "whitelist" of 2 and 3 letter search terms that would be allowed by the system.

Is this something that the MSEs think might work here?

Lorian

Please can MSE allow 3 character searches on the MSE forums?

I know it uses a little more system resource on the server, but it could be just turned off during Martin's TV appearences :money:

As it stands, it's not possible to search the forum for things like "HMV" or "Wii".

Thanks for considering it

Edit> Oops I see someone else already suggested it.

Edit > http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=336151

It's only Wisdom when someone listens!

sra

Adding 3 letter words is supposed to subsantially increase the size of the search database.

But I see over on the demo board at vbulletin.com there's the option to add exceptions - 1/2/3 letter words that you can search for despite them being too short, but I don't know if that's for the version we have.

MSE_Martin

This will be looked at when we upgrade vbull - but it is way down the list at the moment - the servers couldn't cope with it - and the focus of our attention is the site redesign.

Sorry

Martin

jamesd

If you do this, use myisam_ftdump on the search index to get an ordered list of the most frequent words in the index, then add the ones you don't want to search on to a custom stop word list. That will limit the search index size growth.

It's also worth doing it on your current search index, so you can add a few more stop words and cut the size down a bit.