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Three letters search limitation

A

Ariebaba

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netherlands
I think the three letter search limitation is silly. A lot of words in aviation and programing are three letter words.. xml, vor, dme, nav, etc. Makes the search function very limited.
 
I would need to check if this is configurable. But when short words are included that means a lot more words have to be stored in the search index and therefore storage and search time will increase. Therefore there is usually a limit.
 
Well, it is probably easier to spoof the filter, than reconfigure the ascii search string to accomplish the same think the "spoof" does. You can include a term that will not likely be found and have no effect on you intended search, such as "giraffe." Any returns that include the term giraffe, in addition to your intended term, "lod,""bgl," etc, can be quickly reviewed for pertinence.
 
Unfortunately, a search with giraffe lod results in the following:

The following words were not included in your search because they are too short, too long, or too common: lod

The word giraffe did find this thread though. :)
 
Apparently "giraffe" is not the best example. You can see "LOD" has several returns, despite being flagged as too short.


lod.jpg

But ya, I think it might be a useless trick, because I don't see any returns for "LOD" that don't also include the longer term.
 
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The short words are not in the search index, so including them with some spoof word won't make any difference. As long as they are not in the index, they will not be searched for.

I am still hesitating what the performance impact would be from including 3 letter words in the index as well. I can see the value of searching for certain abbreviations and such.
 
Three letter search would allow for "the", "are", "and", "not", "will", "for" as example. I shudder to consider the impact of performance.
 
But common terms could be removed from the search index, despite the number of letters. Also, performance would really suffer under individual search load? I understand Google must be careful about superfluous terms, searches are less common here.
 
I'm not sure about the structure of the index, but if we can add some 3 letter words, then we could start a list of candidates.
 
Unless the search index is prescient (I suspect not), then the server would have to run a process through posts to collect all known existences of said words to add them to the index. That would be a major impact on performance every single time it was run (which I suspect is a daily process).
 
The idea about prescience and performance impact is extremely sensible. However, I just went to Avsim and successfully returned hits for "VOR" and then went to flightsimulator.com and did the same thing. Arguably, either one of those sites enjoys more traffic, more searches, while simultaneously enduring these 3 letter cyber attacks, so there is a disconnect somewhere.
 
I have just changed the setting. The search index is rebullidng now (takes a while). Let's see what it does.
 
I don't think that worked, still get no hits for three letter words.
 
Thanks Dick, looks like we need to dive into the mysql config and forum sources to change this. I try to stay away from that where possible.
 
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