Blatman Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 Chaps, Just trying to search for some info and I was shocked (shocked, I tell you) to discover that the search requires a minimum of 3 letters in any words. Makes looking for V8 ............ a bit of a bind... Can that be altered? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cleggy the Spyder Man Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 had the same experience when searching for the word "sex" in here went onto google and hey presto the world was my oyster ;-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark (smokey mow) Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 I have the same problem with SDV and MX5 no problems with Sex though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 Raised that when we had the change over, originally it was a four letter minimum! We got it reduced to three, but it's such a PTA, I still regularly just do a Google site specific search instead. Cam XE SBD QED 16V TPS CPS ARB CRB red The list sort of goes on... The trouble is if your search string includes just one term, the whole string is rejected. That said you can sometimes get away with it if you add a wild card - cam - fails, but - cam* - will work and return results that include cam, cams, camshaft etc. For Smokey - mx5* works too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dstorey Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 "MBE ECU" caused me issues! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark (smokey mow) Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 For Smokey - mx5* works too! Excellent thanks P.s. you listed 16V twice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 No i didn't :blush: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Colonial Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 Chaps, Just trying to search for some info and I was shocked (shocked, I tell you) to discover that the search requires a minimum of 3 letters in any words. Makes looking for V8 ............ a bit of a bind... Can that be altered? Have you done a search? Aaaaaahhhhhh...man, that felt SOOOOOOO good! Dropping it to two letters would be a nonsense, you'd get tons of crud back. Imagine if you type in "ca" - you'd get from cab to caw, with cat, cab, can, and cap thrown in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark (smokey mow) Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 I never thought i'd see the day when Blatman couldn't do a search Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 Sarcastic reply self censored. (For being an ) Please don't berate a reasonable request so flippantly. The fact that the search module may be poor, or the indexing places too much demand on the hardware or software is rather more the issue. if that's the case, or some variation of it, then so be it, we'll have to live with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Colonial Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 Gadgers, I wasn't trying to berate it, sorry if it came over that way, certainly not my intention to do so, just stating my opinion is all, which I hope I'm still allowed. It's already been reduced from 4 to 3, if people only put in two letters, I can see it turning something an awful lot better than the old boardroom one into something useless. However, in the spirit of things, for a day or two, I'll reduce it to 2 letters to see how it gets on - but don't blame me if it produces garbage. Give me 20 minutes. ---------------------------------------------- EDIT: OK, changing that to 2 letters didn't work at all. So I switched "Use fulltext searching" from "Yes" to "No" - now, I have no idea what the devil that means at all, but...it does seem to have worked, and you can now search two letter strings. Don't ask me why, you just can... Note as well that only the last 300 posts or topics in the last 365 days are shown, unless you use the Advanced Search button. If two letters throws up too many anomalies and there are too many complaints, we'll have to look at ramping it back up to 3 letters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 Wasn't having a go Scott honest, but it's been deeply frustrating, if it's a limitation we're stuck with, and we know why, then there are work arounds. Frankly though, as I've alluded to in, er, other threads, that we won't rehash here! I don't think the search function gets used as much or as finely, as a lot think it does! The trouble is, technology and engineering is such an acronym filled world, that even without three letter names, it's still very difficult to drill down to what you want without being able to use at least three characters. Does the search engine not have an internal "ignore" list? (That prevents it trying to index and return hits for basic grammatical terms, or, and, the, its, etc) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Colonial Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 I know I give off an air of slight intelligence on the odd occasion Dave, but f me if I know if it has an internal ignore list. Sorry. I do know that two letter searches like V8 and three letter ones like MX5 do work now, so give it a bash and see what you think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 I can't remember if it's a general term, or just the name used by the last "search engine for dummies" type software I set up. Basically a sort of list of words that the search engine ignores. Typically includes a lot of grammatical "padding" along with terms that are so frequently used as to be useless for searching. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Colonial Posted July 15, 2012 Share Posted July 15, 2012 I think so. If you search for "the" and "it" you get far fewer results than you'd expect. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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