Question About Searchable Words

Okay, this may or may not be considered a dumb question and if it is, I apologize, but ...

Is it a default or deliberate setting that searches cannot be any less than four characters per word?

I ask this because searching "VPI" or "T+" in the classified section for boas is impossible due to this.

I'm not asking it be changed or anything, I was just wondering what the specific reason for it was.

Yes, it seems to dismiss anything that is 3 characters or less. I've had some frustrating times trying to search for things too.
The reason for it, I'm not sure, sorry. >_<

Originally Posted by AbsoluteApril

Yes, it seems to dismiss anything that is 3 characters or less. I've had some frustrating times trying to search for things too.
The reason for it, I'm not sure, sorry. >_<

GAWD! WHAT GOOD ARE YOU, APRIL!?!?!?!?

JK I love you.

<3

The reason this works this way is because the search functions are working off of an index file on the server that is updated each time a new post is made. This index is limited to storing words considered relevant of 4 characters or more, probably because of the number of frivolous (from a search perspective) words that would be included in the index. I believe this can be changed, but everything I have read about it advises not to. Would be nice if simply an exclusion list could be used to exclude common three character words, but it is what it is, I guess.

Sorry, but that's just the way programs are written sometimes.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

The reason this works this way is because the search functions are working off of an index file on the server that is updated each time a new post is made. This index is limited to storing words considered relevant of 4 characters or more, probably because of the number of frivolous (from a search perspective) words that would be included in the index. I believe this can be changed, but everything I have read about it advises not to. Would be nice if simply an exclusion list could be used to exclude common three character words, but it is what it is, I guess.

Sorry, but that's just the way programs are written sometimes.

Okay, I was thinking it might have something to do with the cataloging of the site. Saving words like "the", "and", "but", etc. etc would quickly become asinine and redundant for the program.

It would, indeed, be nice if an exclusion list could be included though.

Thank you for the answer.

Actually I was incorrect in my statement above. VBulletin does have the capability of filtering out common words in the index for the search function. So, yes, I could change the index to accept 3 character words for search purposes. But I'm checking with my programmer for his recommendation. I'm presuming that the entire post database would need to be reindexed, and not sure what that will entail. I expect it will be very time consuming and server intensive, and quite likely will lock out all searches for the duration as well.

But I'll wait to see what he says about it before thinking further on this.