Words that are too short for searching...

[Yuri]

Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : age

Well that doesn't seem to serve any purpose. I just wanted to find out how many "What's your age?" threads this forum has, is all. And the only way to really search for that is searching for the words "age" and "old" in the titles. Apparantly three characters is too small of a word. But there are lots of important words in the dictionary that have only three characters in them!

Not that you need to do anything about it or anything, but that's dumb. Who's with me?!

 

[SimonomiS]

It's annoying for things like that, but I guess under three letters is just too undefined and would give such large results it's hard to do. Or something.

But yeah, not that they need to do anything, it's just annoying at times.

 

[Sgt. Redneck]

It is like that, because such a small word would most likely occour alot (or so that is the expectation for a word of the length) and to prevent the server from doing some big time searching for something it may find 100,000 occourances of it tells you it is too short to protect itself.

 

[Adabiviak]

I can see giving a warning that you may get a lot of bogus results with that sort of search criteria, but it still should let the search go through.

 

[Sgt. Redneck]

Like I said, IT WOULD BOG THEIR SERVER DOWN!

 

[ríomhaire]

Yeah. I searched for the NPC guide before, :hmph:

 

[Munro]

3 word searches would cause the Halflife2.net server to explode and cease all life on Earth.

 

[Fat Tony!]

Yes, a limit to the word size basically causes the entire search facility to be useless

 

[Yuri]

3 word searches would cause the Halflife2.net server to explode and cease all life on Earth.

You mean three-letter word searches?

I don't get how that's a server issue, but I don't really know all that much about servers, so whatever.

 

[Evo]

I think i have carried out searches for Evo before, and i saw now explosion.


Oh wait, shouldn't i be dead then?

 

[Sulkdodds]

Maybe if you were able to search for more than one three-letter word?

old + age

 

[Teta_Bonita]

3 word searches would cause the Halflife2.net server to explode and cease all life on Earth.

No they wouldn't, hardly anybody uses the search function. :angel:

 

[kirovman]

or at least be able to search in the same way as search engines use

"How old are you" in quotes should be allowed.

If 3 letter words are too short for search, they should also be too short for thread titles :O

 

[Yuri]

or at least be able to search in the same way as search engines use

"How old are you" in quotes should be allowed.

If 3 letter words are too short for search, they should also be too short for thread titles :O

Agreed.

Not like I actually expected anyone to do anything about this, but it is dumb...

 

[Vegeta897]

Poll status: 27 to none teehee

 

[Yuri]

Joule and Shens both just don't like me, so their votes don't count.

 

[Ikerous]

LOL you people are newbs!

I never use the search feature on forums. The best thing to do is use google.

heres an example

allintitle: "how old are you" site:halflife2.net

That'll give you every thread with that in the title
You can do it for anything and its far better than the forum's search feature

I came up with this myself too ^_^

::Waits to be praised::

 

[kirovman]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...ing+to+do+is+use+google."+halflife2.net&meta=

Where's your post then?

 

[CrazyHarij]

LOL you people are newbs!

I never use the search feature on forums. The best thing to do is use google.

heres an example

allintitle: "how old are you" site:halflife2.net

That'll give you every thread with that in the title
You can do it for anything and its far better than the forum's search feature

I came up with this myself too ^_^

::Waits to be praised::

Shit, that's cool :O

 

[Beerdude26]

Shit, that's cool :O

Lol, you didn't know?

 

[Yuri]

LOL you people are newbs!

I never use the search feature on forums. The best thing to do is use google.

heres an example

allintitle: "how old are you" site:halflife2.net

That'll give you every thread with that in the title
You can do it for anything and its far better than the forum's search feature

I came up with this myself too ^_^

::Waits to be praised::

Doesn't work very well.

http://www.google.com/search?hs=Blq...+searching..."+site:halflife2.net&btnG=Search

Since google waits a little while before it is logged...

You can't narrow it down to a single forum, either.

 

[Harryz]

Even though I would like to see a 3 letter search, I'd rather have a faster site then the ability to do 3 letter searches.

 

[Ikerous]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...ing+to+do+is+use+google."+halflife2.net&meta=

Where's your post then?

I've never had the need to search for text i was looking at

The majority of the time Google does exactly what I'm looking for with the exception of newer posts which obviously won't show up (So obvious i didnt feel the need to point out they wouldnt show up in the post, i assumed it was a blatant exception). However, since thats rarely what i search for, google works most of the time.

(And anything that doesnt work with google, i use the forum's search for, but a lot of the time i get problems with it leaving out words so google > *)

Doesn't work very well.

http://www.google.com/search?hs=Blq...+searching..."+site:halflife2.net&btnG=Search

Since google waits a little while before it is logged...

You can't narrow it down to a single forum, either.

It worked for finding birthday threads and any thread i've ever needed. So i'm content with it

 

[63]

I voted NO without reading the question!

 

[bliink]

LOL you people are newbs!

I never use the search feature on forums. The best thing to do is use google.

heres an example

allintitle: "how old are you" site:halflife2.net

That'll give you every thread with that in the title
You can do it for anything and its far better than the forum's search feature

I came up with this myself too ^_^

::Waits to be praised::

only works for stuff thats been indexed though..

I would like 3 word searches, but the DB would evaporate in a puff of steam if they were allowed

 

[Yuri]

only works for stuff thats been indexed though..

I would like 3 word searches, but the DB would evaporate in a puff of steam if they were allowed

Why does everyone think that? I want to know how three-letter (not word) searches are 100,000 times worse on the server than four-letter searches. I realize that two letter searches is ridiculous. But three, dammit, there are SO MANY THREE LETTER WORDS! >:[


And SixThree, I guess you just don't like me, huh?

 

[theGreenBunny]

Why three letters? It depends on the search method this forum uses. It's either option 1 or 2:

EDIT NOTE: I have since figured out the actual reason which I've put in point 3, so you can ignore 1 and 2.

1. The forum has a search index, to which the indexed words (ie. those >3 letters) in every post are 'added' (not literally but bear with me) as the post itself is added to the database. The search feature then uses that index to find the goods. To avoid a huge bloated search database (filled with "the" and "are") only words larger than 3 letters are indexed.

2. The forum uses the fulltext search built into mysql (db software). This is allegedly faster than the older index method. However, to avoid large amounts of hits vB limits to 3> words. I'm not entirely sure why. Possibly it's to force a reduced amount of noise results, or possibly the mysql query takes exponentionally longer with 3-letter words included.

BEGIN EDIT: I've confirmed that this is the reason:
3. vBulletin uses mysql fulltext search, and this search is restricted to words of at least 4 characters. As the MySQL manual page on FULLTEXT states:

Any word that is too short is ignored. The default minimum length of words that are found by full-text searches is four characters.

There you have it. It's the database's fault and can't feasibly be changed or fixed.
END EDIT.

Realize that on a huge forum like this search is a luxury. It's hard to make it acceptably fast, it can eat resources and it can eat database space (all depending on implementation). I'd say, take what you can get.

 

[The Monkey]

I voted NO without reading the question!

Your blood is upon you.

 

[Yuri]

Why three letters? It depends on the search method this forum uses. It's either option 1 or 2:

EDIT NOTE: I have since figured out the actual reason which I've put in point 3, so you can ignore 1 and 2.

1. The forum has a search index, to which the indexed words (ie. those >3 letters) in every post are 'added' (not literally but bear with me) as the post itself is added to the database. The search feature then uses that index to find the goods. To avoid a huge bloated search database (filled with "the" and "are") only words larger than 3 letters are indexed.

2. The forum uses the fulltext search built into mysql (db software). This is allegedly faster than the older index method. However, to avoid large amounts of hits vB limits to 3> words. I'm not entirely sure why. Possibly it's to force a reduced amount of noise results, or possibly the mysql query takes exponentionally longer with 3-letter words included.

BEGIN EDIT: I've confirmed that this is the reason:
3. vBulletin uses mysql fulltext search, and this search is restricted to words of at least 4 characters. As the MySQL manual page on FULLTEXT states:


There you have it. It's the database's fault and can't feasibly be changed or fixed.
END EDIT.

Realize that on a huge forum like this search is a luxury. It's hard to make it acceptably fast, it can eat resources and it can eat database space (all depending on implementation). I'd say, take what you can get.

I was assuming that this forum was using #2, since it seems to make the most sense to me. It just doesn't seem like 3-letter searches would make that much of a difference. Two letters would be different.

And #3 is just "4 characters minimum, just because." It doesn't explain why. Stupid MySQL and forum and crap. >:[

The "just use the search button" comment cannot be justified until three letter words are searchable. >:[

I figured no one would change it, only if it was a forum-specific change (edit a "4" to a "3") and they had a lot of convincing. So okay. Thanks TGB