This seems to be the only place to put this, but why is the search feature retarded? Everytime i search and put like 5 words in, it says That is under the minimum 3 word limit. and puts one of the many words in brackets... WTF is up with this?
example:
305 5 speed T5 Transmission

The search term you specified (5) is under the minimum word length (3) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.


ideas?

 

yea, i agree, i have ALWAYS thought that was pretty screwed up seeing as a LOT of things people would want to search for will be under 3 words....

Josh

 

It is not possible to search for words less than three characters. For example, if you wanted to search for something related to oxygen sensors, the term "O2" would not work since it is only two letters long.

In your case, the "5" and "T5" are both under the minimum letter limit. Even though they are technically not real words, the search engine counts them as words, too.

Try using an asterisk to make each word reach the letter limit (e.g. T5*).

 

well, yea, we know you can't search for words under 3 characters...that is our complaint...

Josh

 

While that will be accepted, it will NOT just find any words that match "T5". Instead, it will find a lot of extra "junk", like T56 entries.

https://www.thirdgen.org/techbb2/sho...hreadid=232985

Edit:
Just to provide further info. The reason why you can only search for 3 letters or more, is because the Admins (Dirk and Iroc) have set the minimum search word to 3 letters. The reason why it is set to 3, and not 2, is because on a forum this large with this many posts and data, the search database itself would amount to gigs worth of data.

When you perform a search on vBulletin, you are not actually scanning the actual posts. Instead, your search is scanning the search database that the vBulletin software is constantly building upon. It would be like an index. This index continues to grow and become tuned when posts are created, edited, deleted, atleast in the stock vBulletin system. I think Dirk changed a few functions on that, but that is getting off topic.

This index that is built, does not contain any words that are 2 letters or less because the option is set to not do so, due to reasons above. It also does not contain certain "bad words" that are junk search words, such as common phrase words.

Because of the above, you can never really get around or trick the search engine to find any word less than what the minmium will allow, because it simply is not in the index. You can't find something in there that is not in there in the first place.

The term "T5" is not in the search index. Therefore, you cannot search by it.

Searching "T5*" or just about any other combination will result in stuff like t-56 or t56. If you see any "T5" terms in the posts from the search results while doing the above trick, it is merely because the term "t5*" (t-56, t56) was there, and that was the actual term you were searching on. You will find quite a bit of threads on TGO were both the term t56/t-56 and t5/t-5 are used in the same thread.

While you may see a few "t5" comments in the search result, because of the above, you will not find them all.

That * option was not meant to bypass a limitation, because it really cannot.

This of course will probably change once TGO upgrades the vBulletins software to 3.x. While there already is a 3.x software already out, TGO is wanting the vBulletin supported option that works with mysql's full text searching.