Search functionality
 

Would it be possible to turn off the minimum string length function in search?

I find myself often searching for things in which the three-character strings is the most important term, such as VHB or DXF.

Hey Jeff!

I had the same thought but I found that if I put quotes around the smaller words the search works.

Been watching your build and it looks like it's going great!

Later,

-The other Washington Jeff (with a wood table)

I agree; the search facility of this forum stinks! Have been meaning to find something better.

You guys that hang around on other forums, do you know of a vBulletin forum with a nice search facility?

Gerald,

I have found the same problem on most of the forums and even the VBulletin ones. I like the idea of using quotes.

It would be great if they came up with a different way of searching.

Actually, that's an old, old problem in electronic searching. Many people use short words in their searchings that should not normally be indexed. We used to call those "stopwords" in library systems. For example, "a", "and", "the", "in", etc.

If you search them by default, your result sets end up unusably large, and relevancy numbers get thrown off. The article with the most " a " in it tends to win in any search including " a ".

A more modern choice is to rely on the searcher (that's you) to give a hint to the search engine that you really want to search on a short word. It eliminates built-in stopwords, which used to cause other problems in certain search domains. Hence the search working when enclosed in quotes.

I eventually used google;

e.g.
download dxf site:mechmate.com