Forum Search - How Do You...??

Seems there's a minimum number of characters required to do a search. Then there's multi-word searches. All these years and I still haven't a solid clue how to refine searches. For example;

How do you search for, say, ELO only?

Then how do you search for only Electric Light Orchestra, not everything with electric and /or light and/or orchestra in it?

Wrap it in quotes. :)

"electric light orchestra"

Thanks, Dan.

Does that mean searching for ELO isn't a happenin' thang?

Full text searching is a database function... The vBulletin software runs on a database application called mySQL. The full text (search everything) is configured by default to work with a minimum of 4 characters. Dan could go back in and recompile the database changing this variable but it really is more trouble than it is worth, and has the possibility of introducing more problems by having slower queries, raise your hand if you want a slow ODJT (JT put your hand down since you got AT&T ;))

Trust me on this, done the research, been there done that.

Thanks, Dan.

Does that mean searching for ELO isn't a happenin' thang?

Basically what Travis said. Indexing words with less than 4 characters is going to slow down our searching and posting significantly. Imagine how many times 'the' will be indexed. :sqerr:

Hey Dan,

I tried the standard boolean operators, like AND, OR and NOT to combine keywords. Do they NOT function in VB...? :)

I always thought vB supported boolean but yesterday while finding a solution for Cap I found out it does not fully support boolean. Which is surprising to say the least.. Maybe there's an admin setting for it, I'll have to look but it should be enabled by default. It seems some functions are booleansish like the quote wrapping trick while other boolean functions are ignored.

and is automatically assumed when searching for more than one word. For example searching for softjock rick will pull up results with for both 'softjock' and 'rick'. I do believe the minus sign works though.. ex softjock -rick will pull results for softjock where rick isn't mentioned.

ex softjock -rick will pull results for softjock where rick isn't mentioned.

How could anybody possibly write a post like that... :sqlaugh: :rofl: