Search improvement request.

[Ysgarran]

Currently the search option does not allow three letter searches. I can understand that. It limits the load on the machine.

What about searches like this:
"Shot on the run".

How would I do that search? It shouldn't filter out 'on', 'the' and 'run'. This is really a 14 letter search and not a number of three letter searches.

You may not be able to do this depending on how the search engine parses its search targets...

later,
Ysgarran.

 

[Umbran]

Well, "Shot on the run" is a feat. To narrow it down, you could search on "feat AND shot".

 

[Psionicist]

I'd suggest something like

shot*run

or possibly

shot*on*the*run

Please note that wildcard searches are quite demanding for the server (due to the nature of the search engine) so please try shot*run before shot*on*the*run.

 

[Ysgarran]

This what I ended up doing and it did find what I was looking for. I was suprised that the search engine did treat something in quotes as a single search token instead of multiple ones.

Ysgarran.

Well, "Shot on the run" is a feat. To narrow it down, you could search on "feat AND shot".

 

[Dismas]

This what I ended up doing and it did find what I was looking for. I was suprised that the search engine did treat something in quotes as a single search token instead of multiple ones.

Ysgarran.

As I understand it, the way the full text search on vbulletin works is that everytime you post each word over 3 letters and not in its noise (common) list is added to the search engines Word List, along with info to say where in a particular post the word occurs.

When you run a search something along the lines of this happens:
1) Search Engine finds the ID for each word in your search
2) Search Engine search the Word List for all occurences of the Word ID and gets a list of locations
3) Search Engine performs extra operations to for AND, OR, Exact Phrase, Proximity types of searches
4) Results list is generated.

As the words have been filtered out of the search engine when your initial post is added to the database the search will fail at stage one.

WotC have recently moved over to Vb and people have complained that they cannot do searches for Elf, AC, HP etc.

It is possible to modify the default settings of the search engine (details on the Vb website) but there will be a general performance hit on normal operations. The search tables for the WotC boards (running with the default settings) had over 1.8 million records after the first 2 weeks of posting.

Pax