Complaint about Search Engine

[Clean Gultch]

i am frustrated that there is a mininum to how logn a word can be. this means i have to enter unneccasery words which resuklts in more results that are prolly useless. if this ticks any of you off, please share!

 

[Phillip]

I agree that searching with words greater than three letters can be frustrating, however, there is a specific reason why this is in place.

In order to host a forum all of the posts and pages are stored in a large database (ours is currently nearly 400 megs in size). A "searchindex" is used to store all the words needed to do a search. If this didn't exist, each time you did a search it would crush the server.

The size of a searchindex is a huge factor in determining the size of a forum's database, just as much as the actual number of posts. This is why the searches appear instantly and are so accurate. As you add more and more words to the searchindex your forum's database grows exponentially. As more people post, the bigger the server load, and the slower the searches become. So there is a limit to the size of the words in order to keep the searchindex to a more manageable size.

Again, I agree that it can be frustrating, but hopefully you understand a little bit better why it's in place right now. Usually if you refine your search with different words you can find a good solution. If there is a way for us to work around this issue in the future in a better manner, we'll be sure to highly consider it.