The Search Feature
 

is god-awful. :)

Am I right in assuming it's so bad in order to save on resources or somesuch?

It seems that every single word that I try to search for is either deemed too general or too specific.

I know, I remember when the search was disabled - what a bad time that was. But even so, is there anything that we could do in order to make it more useful to members? I know on multiple occasions I've remembered threads that could have helped me help/describe something to another member but when I go to search for them I'm shot down.


Anyway, thanks for listening to my 2:40 am rant.

>_>

_EW_

Not sure what you're trying to say, jaymack ;)

_EW_

What are you trying to search for, for example? The search feature is currently set up not to index words with less than 5 characters in them, presumably to keep the size of the search index down. Exceptions can be specified though in case of words that are shorter but commonly relevant to search for.

You can also try using * wildcards in your search string if you're unsure of the exact words to search for. (Searching for repub* for example will include any indexed words (i.e. those of sufficient length) that starts with repub, for example republic, republican, republished.)

Unfortunately I can't think of specific cases right now. :(

However, how are exceptions handled? Because I know for a fact there are some important 4 letter words.

EDIT::Wait a second.... quotations never worked for me before. When was that added, the stoffe? >_<

I kind of feel foolish now.

_EW_

Actually the search features are very much improved with vBulletin 3.7. Instead of having to rely on word-index table, this version leverages MySQL's fulltext indexing which (in theory) allows the search for anything. The ability to quote your search term is also new, as you've noticed.

The 5 character minimum limit prevents tiny word searches from bogging down the forum for everyone -- though there is also a 500-result limit also in place to prevent that. So you can't search for "bad" but you can search for "bad mojo".