Forum Feedback Allow 3 letter searches

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SiriusB

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tl;dr version:
Problem: 4 letter search term limit.
Suggestion: Lower this limit to 3 letter search terms, please.

Full version:
Currently, there appears to be a limit of at least 4 letter words when searching. I always get miffed by this limitation in forum search and am surprised that it's not been raised before.
Yes, I can try google site search or reword, but those options always return pages of unrelated matches, or no matches at all.

Some search terms involving three letters:
FUP, 1tb, 2tb, 3tb, 60D, PHP, SEO, D3S

Thanks.
 
I believe it's a technical limitation of MySQL, and not artificial limitation by forum settings.
 
in tech forum its a nightmare to be honest not to be able to search 3 letter word. But I guess its a limitation that I am seeing in almost all forums I visit.

The problem is that some key brands cannot be searched which are very important to tech forum like AMD, XFX in addition to terms already mentioned above.

Not to mention we are so used to using abbreviations here for particular products like R3E, R3F, C2D etc.

This is where google advance search can come handy.

Use it. Google Advanced Search
 
iGo said:
I believe it's a technical limitation of MySQL, and not artificial limitation by forum settings.
Click to expand...

I think the DB can be pattern searched on three character wild cards. Not sure "where" exactly the search happens on forums. Probably the query of such parameter would cause extensive loads. Guessing. :) But how different would this be from a 50 character string in terms of performance.

Hope some guru can answer.
 
I think admins mentioned that it is possible to enable 3 letter search but that it is very server intensive. One work around we had last time was to have a table of commonly used 3 letter words and enable search for those words alone. I guess we could think about this once we finish sorting out the existing server issues.
 
I guess it would be "what the search query" throws back as its output. There would be a ton of yield for smaller letters for obvious reasons vs. a longer string which is currently permitted. And then to get it to render would take even longer.
 
Well we have a plan to use a better search system in the future which is not as resource intensive. It will have 3 letter search option as default. Also we can probably reduce wait time between search.

But all this is expected to happen in a month or two as it involves a lot of testing first.
 
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