Can the search engine be tweaked?

[Turbo_Squish]

There may be technical reasons why this isn't possible, but is there any way to include three-letter words in searches? Not being able to search for three-letter words makes searching here almost impossible, especially when you consider the following terms are excluded:

PS3, 360, Wii, PSP, PS2, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, APF, 2K8, LCD, DLP, etc., etc.

I hate starting new threads to ask simple questions, but sometimes it's the only way to find anything around here. For example, if I want PSP-specific information in the MLB 08 forum, there's no way to find it through searches.

Can this be changed?

[fishepa]

Re: Can the search engine be tweaked?

I am not sure, I will have to check on it.

[Stu]

Re: Can the search engine be tweaked?

I think the issue with allowing 3 letter words in searches is it allows people to put words like "the" in their search which returns a ridiculous number of results.

One thing I'd like to see is the time between searches reduced to at least 30 seconds. 60 is just too long. Your shiny new server should be able to handle it.

[bkfount]

Re: Can the search engine be tweaked?

I think the issue with allowing 3 letter words in searches is it allows people to put words like "the" in their search which returns a ridiculous number of results.

One thing I'd like to see is the time between searches reduced to at least 30 seconds. 60 is just too long. Your shiny new server should be able to handle it.

well I'm sure you could keep words like "the" or "and" in the filter that currently keeps you from searching for them. I don't see why you couldn't allow for short relevant things like ps3.

[Stu]

Re: Can the search engine be tweaked?

well I'm sure you could keep words like "the" or "and" in the filter that currently keeps you from searching for them. I don't see why you couldn't allow for short relevant things like ps3.

There's no filter in vbulletin to allow terms like ps3 to be searched. The filter only let's you exclude terms from searches and set the length of word that can be searched. I assume they just have it set to 4 characters as the minimum word length. I guess theoretically they could set it to 3 characters but then somebody would have to enter all the common 3 letter words in the exclude setting, which would be incredibly tedious.

[Blzer]

Re: Can the search engine be tweaked?

There's no filter in vbulletin to allow terms like ps3 to be searched. The filter only let's you exclude terms from searches and set the length of word that can be searched. I assume they just have it set to 4 characters as the minimum word length. I guess theoretically they could set it to 3 characters but then somebody would have to enter all the common 3 letter words in the exclude setting, which would be incredibly tedious.

That's not too bad, actually.

Well, actually... after typing that sentence, I'd say those three words don't belong in searches either.

[eDotd]

Re: Can the search engine be tweaked?

Is there anyway to allow the user to add a character in front of the term that has to be found? Like if I wanted to search "2K4", I'd search for #2K4 or +2K4, or any combination of a unique character + search term. I remember seeing this on a forum, unfortunately I can't remember which one it was. I also don't remember if it used vbulletin or phpbb..