"XP" Looms...

[chrisjk]

Around October time your going to have to get rid of this annoying and pointless minimum word size limit on the forum search methinks...

[sail3005]

yeah, i know. it is really annoying. I got really pissed when i was looking for this thread about ip addresses. :(

[filburt1]

I wished Google indexed the forums but it doesn't. :(

[sail3005]

why is there a limit anyway?

[beachbum]

"expee"? :p

[aknisely]

ecks pi

[HarryW]

Maybe it saves on indexing space. If you skip all words smaller than, say, 3 characters long, you can cut down your index size.

I think the vBulletin team have had quite a few problems with the search function using a lot of resources, that's why it's been unavailable every now and again.

Still, I can see it's a pain when you're looking for stuff like 'IP'.

[thinktank]

Can't they blacklist common keywords that are insignificant and allow every other keyword. That is what Google does.

Search "of" in google. It returns...

"of" is a very common word and was not included in your search

While "IP" is included for search ( returned about 3,240,000 links).

[sail3005]

yeah, i remember in one post john suggested using alternate meanings for the words. But who doesn't abberviate IP??

[HarryW]

That's a good strategy, but it does take a bit of work to implement. The list of stop words (as they're called) would have to be pretty large to keep things efficient, although using a stop word list does have the added benefit of being able to exclude longer common words, that are equally useless, such as 'although', 'however' and so on.

If you want to be all clever about it you can also use stemming where, for instance, the words 'stop', 'stopped', 'stopping' and 'stopper' would all be indexed as the same word, further saving on index size.

[PuterFreak]

Windows+XP seems to work...

[thinktank]

You are a real genius puterfreak http://www.vbforums.com/images/icons/icon14.gif

IP+Number works too..

[PuterFreak]

Originally posted by thinktank
You are a real genius puterfreak http://www.vbforums.com/images/icons/icon14.gif

IP+Number works too.. thanks hehe:D

[sail3005]

SWEET... Thanks a lot!

[PuterFreak]

Originally posted by sail3005
SWEET... Thanks a lot! np. glad I could help.

[plenderj]

Though to solve this surely they could just use a second server for purely indexing+searching purposes. Could also be used as a backup server.

[HarryW]

That's great, but it does of course require the use of another server :rolleyes:

[plenderj]

Well I've got lots of spare P5 boxes lying around here doing sweet ****all