Search is frustrating ?!?

[tubut]

The minimum word length of 3 characters in Search has repeatedly frustrated the hell out of me.

The last incident was a search for "TZ no 57" (none of the 3 terms accepted, therefore no result). Try searching for "#57" and be surprised at the result.

A previous incident that I still remember was searching for "Bill of Sale" (the term "of" was not accepted, hence the search had to be changed to "Bill sale" and you would not believe how many theads there are where a person named Bill talked about a sale.

To add insult to injury, once the server happily responded something like: "The search term you specified (tz) is under the minimum word length (3) and therefore will not be found", the next thing I often encounter after changing the search term is: "This forum requires that you wait 20 seconds between searches. Please try again in XX seconds." This often happens because no results are found.

Frustrating, frustrating, frustrating !!!!!

[tubut]

BTW: I think a search term length of 2 characters minimum is necessary to give better results, and time between searches should be reduced to 10 seconds.

[geh458]

Don't complain, it use to four character minimum.

To get around the three character limit, try using the "wildcard" character, which is "*". I tried your search "TZ* 57*" (entered without the quote marks) and I got two replies.

[tubut]

Quote:

Originally Posted by geh458 Don't complain, it use to four character minimum. To get around the three character limit, try using the "wildcard" character, which is "*". I tried your search "TZ* 57*" (entered without the quote marks) and I got two replies.

[geh458]

Asearch on "TZ*" will return results that have the letters "TZ" at the beginning of the word, no mater what the third character is. It would find TZ, TZ2, TZ/, etc.


However, no matter what I type in the search, I couldn't find the post you mention. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it was only posted yesterday, maybe there's some kind of a time limit involved?

[ossodiseppia]

I searched for "Bill of Sale" and got hits. I think the key is to put quotes around it so that it searches for the string. But, that doesn't help much with searching for TZ.

[tubut]

Quote:

Originally Posted by geh458 Asearch on "TZ*" will return results that have the letters "TZ" at the beginning of the word, no mater what the third character is. It would find TZ, TZ2, TZ/, etc. However, no matter what I type in the search, I couldn't find the post you mention. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it was only posted yesterday, maybe there's some kind of a time limit involved?

[tubut]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ossodiseppia I searched for "Bill of Sale" and got hits. I think the key is to put quotes around it so that it searches for the string. But, that doesn't help much with searching for TZ.

[BILL H]

i recently tried to search for a/c to no avail.
air conditioning yielded 2 posts that weren't relevent

frustrating

bill
91 164L
88 3.0 milano
73 spider
73 gtv jr

[smestas]

Sorry about the search limitations guys. There are reasons that things are set the way they are though. The search feature takes up a large amount of the servers CPU power and we have to stretch all that we can to keep things working. If I allow 2 character searches I feel that it could potentially do much harm to the servers overall performance during peak hours. Imagine if someone was searching for the word "is". Basically the server would be sorting thru every posting on the site that has the letters "is" in it. I’d suspect that the results would be large.

As for the 20 second limit it is to stop bots (automated software) from concurrently abusing our search feature and also affecting performance.

I think that the sites search feature is very good but I think that what we need is a search guide. Like explaining wildcards, quotes, AND, OR, NOT when using the search.

One other option is using Google. You can limit your search to just AlfaBB.com via their advanced search feature. Here is a link to results from a google seach for the letters "TZ". Click here to see the Google results.


.

[Pat Braden]

Quote:

Originally Posted by smestas Sorry about the search limitations guys. There are reasons that things are set the way they are though. The search feature takes up a large amount of the servers CPU power and we have to stretch all that we can to keep things working. If I allow 2 character searches I feel that it could potentially do much harm to the servers overall performance during peak hours. Imagine if someone was searching for the word "is". Basically the server would be sorting thru every posting on the site that has the letters "is" in it. I’d suspect that the results would be large. As for the 20 second limit it is to stop bots (automated software) from concurrently abusing our search feature and also affecting performance. I think that the sites search feature is very good but I think that what we need is a search guide. Like explaining wildcards, quotes, AND, OR, NOT when using the search. One other option is using Google. You can limit your search to just AlfaBB.com via their advanced search feature. Here is a link to results from a google seach for the letters "TZ". Click here to see the Google results. .

[tubut]

Searching for "tz no 57 site:www.alfabb.com" did indeed produce the desired result.
Great tip, Simon !!!

[smestas]

Yeah the Google search engine is very good.

I once incorporated the Google search into the site but didn't like that it took the user out of the site for the results and then possibly back depending on the search results.