Problems with search

Message

fghellar · Post by **fghellar** » Fri Apr 19, 2002 7:07 pm

If I go to the search section of the forum and type "kde", it won't find any threads. It won't find "apm" either. Is it set to ignore words with less than 4 characters?

Nitro · Post by **Nitro** » Fri Apr 19, 2002 8:45 pm

fghellar wrote:If I go to the search section of the forum and type "kde", it won't find any threads. It won't find "apm" either. Is it set to ignore words with less than 4 characters?

I never noticed that, it appears that you are correct. I tried "*kde*" and it listed a bunch of threads. I guess it makes sense though, then people can't easily search for the word 'the' or 'for'.

fghellar · Post by **fghellar** » Fri Apr 19, 2002 8:57 pm

Sure, but then they'll miss apm, kde, x11... Maybe it'd be good to add some instructions telling them to use *kde* instead...

Nitro · Post by **Nitro** » Sat Apr 20, 2002 2:42 am

After looking at the script, the search was not limited by the length, rather it was the way the SQL query was constructed. I fixed it, if you get a chance, test it a little.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

fghellar · Post by **fghellar** » Sat Apr 20, 2002 3:03 am

Yes, it's better now... But there's still something strange there. If you search for "kde", you'll see that the topic QT, KDE Library Versions gets listed, but if you search for "qt", it doesn't, even with the option "Search topic title and message text" checked.

fghellar · Post by **fghellar** » Sun Apr 21, 2002 5:07 am

It won't find "fhs" too, although I'm aware of at least two posts containing that word:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... hlight=fhs
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... hlight=fhs

Nitro · Post by **Nitro** » Sat Apr 27, 2002 8:25 pm

fghellar, you are right about the search. The reason it acts like this is because everytime someone posts a message, all the words are indexed in a table with the corresponding message id and some other stuff. I don't know how efficent it would be to index the 2 and 3 letter words too. I see a need for it, but it wouldn't work well with the way the search feature is setup now. I guess that for the common posts we just need to send people to links that we know already exist.

The reason the kde search worked above is because stuff like kde2, kde3, kdebase, kdeinit, and other similar words are in the index. If someone started a topic and only said "kde" in it, then we would be unable to search for it.

Hopefully down the road the main phpbb developers will design a new way to search, because this would kind of be way over my head. Unless someone who understands PHP and MySQL would be interested in working with me.....

Problems with search

Problems with search

Re: Problems with search