Forum question - search function

[Jay 02 TA ws6]

Links to searches appear to expire, huh? I didn't know that... I realized after I posted a couple links to a few searches, that when I went back to click on them, it returned no results.

Anyway, can we make an improvement to the search function? It might be a performance issue for the database, but the search function seems so limited right now because it ignores common words... well, some of those words are common because - well, they're COMMON ... I often times find myself unable to search effectively because what I need to search for gets ignored.

Thanks for the consideration...

[fastTa]

I love this board and my friends that are here, but the database and site need some critical improvements made. Far too much downtime and database problems.

I get the impression that only the site owner Jim has access and/or priveleges to the crtical functions of this board. Just my observation, but that probably isn't the best of ideas.

There are several people on this board who would be glad to help out I'm sure.

[bru333]

This is a common problem on many boards. Don't know if there is any way to fix it without overloading server resources. Thirdgen.org had a big problem with their search feature crashing the server when they first switched to vBulletin.

Any time I want to run a search on a board and include those common terms that are always ignored, I will use the advanced search feature in Google. You can limit the search to the specific site by filling in the domain field. http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

[fastTa]

It's not a common problem for the User Control Panel to be down for weeks at a time.

It is pretty common for databases to become corrupt, but that's why they need regular maintenance. I would be glad to help.

[TraceZ]

I wish the search engine didnt toss out words with 3 letters in them. We have all kinds of 3 letter acronyms we use here and nobody can search on them. CAI, MAF, ABS, IAT, IAS, MAP just to name a few.

[fastTa]

I wish the search engine didnt toss out words with 3 letters in them. We have all kinds of 3 letter acronyms we use here and nobody can search on them. CAI, MAF, ABS, IAT, IAS, MAP just to name a few.

Obviously by default, the minimum value is four characters, but that can easily be changed. In MySQL, the minimum and maximum length of search words to be indexed is defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables. The default maximum is dependant on the particular version of MySQL that we are running 3.0.7.

Something like this "ft_min_word_len=3".

The only additional thing required to do is to restart the server, then rebuild our FULLTEXT indexes after we change the minimum character search length.

I suspect that we likely have one or more tables that have out grown themselves. Someone needs to just use "ALTER TABLE" command to increase the MAX_ROWS and AVG_ROW_LENGTH table option values.

There should be a database utilty available in our version of MySQL named "myisamchk". It will specifically query all the tables and provide a diagnostic report.

[Jay 02 TA ws6]

I wish the search engine didnt toss out words with 3 letters in them. We have all kinds of 3 letter acronyms we use here and nobody can search on them. CAI, MAF, ABS, IAT, IAS, MAP just to name a few.

That's exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about... hell, even LS1, LT1, LS6, LS2, and LS7 get ignored... WS6, T56, Z28, etc...