Because the NASA scientists that worked on the Apollo 11 space program also coded vBulletin's search functionality.

I hate to bring this subject up again, but will the new forum software allow us to search for words less than 4 characters, or is the resource issue still a factor?

I'd really like a 3 letter limit. lots of stuff in TV Talk can't be found with the 4 letter and 3 plus an asterisk never works for me. obviously 2 letters would get too many hits, but I think 3 would be the right balance between number of hits and being able to search for stuff you actually are looking for

one of my favorite movies in recent times is "may". after watching it on dvd i was excited to come here and search for discussion on it to see what others think about it.

anyway, that plan failed.

the problem isn't just for movies though, it's everything: movies, music, books, songs, artists, etc

can't even find an old DDD thread unless someone mentions deepdiscountdvd in it.

I too would like to see this reduced to a three letter minimum. Four is a royal pain in the ass.

:lol:

Two issues I have: sometimes the fuzzy search doesn't work. Case in point, I was looking to see what threads were available about Live Aid (the bandaid concert). Live returned far too many, Aid wasn't allowed. When I tried adding various bands and people like Geldof, it did find ones, but not the one I was looking for. Surely allowing some three letter words as qualifiers would be good (ie you need at least one 4+ letter word and the three letter words will only get rid of some of the threads already found).

Aside from the greater than three letter issue (which is a problem), it would also be nice if you could do a search for a specific string. If, for example, I search for "Bill Gates" (quotes included), the search will also return a thread about front gates with a line 'posted by Bill Bloggs' as being a hit.

Makes it really difficult when you're trying to use fuzzy words to get around the three character search.

I still say the biggest problem is not being able to search for "DVD". ;) But I can understand your frustration in not being able to search for your all-time favorite show ... ALF. :)

No one is ever going to be able to search for the movie M. Oh well.

I share your pain. Nobody can find my review of O either.

maybe it's just me, but I can't get the search function to work right period. E.g. I was searchingin the DVDTalk Forum for Hellboy and none of the topics that came up were even remotely related to Hellboy

The searching works for me. Maybe the DB is still rebuilding and it's a bit flakey now?

Surely software in 2004/5 should be able to search for WORDS that are one letter long (obviously with the exception of "A" and "I") without too much trouble. I mean things like "M" and "O" wouldn't turn up very much as single words. And if we could search on 'hard spaces', we could get to a three letter minimum such as "<space>M<space>".

Maybe I'm not up on the logic behind forum searching, but I can't imagine it would be too hard a load on the server.

I don't understand the resource issue.

Say you do a search for the film "If" and get 10,000 results. You are still only sending 20 or whatever to the client. When the user hits next it loads another 20. Any SQL database should be able to handle doing simple SELECT statements yielding thousands of results. Its not like it sends all of the results to the browser - it does a SELECT and then moves on to the next task.

I'd also like to be able to search for strings. Life would be much easier if I could search for "Jet Li", even if Jet Li were disallowed. It would also allow me to find "Christopher Lee" and "Bruce Lee" among all the other Christophers and Bruces.

Could Geoff hard code a few allowable short words into the search engine? There must be under a hundred. That would handle titles like O, XXX, M, 24, Ed, $$$ (Dollars), and the like.

I agree with all of this.

I'm not sure if this has been brought up, but now we can't search common words. I was searching for Over There and it told me that the search couldn't be done because those words are too common. If we do an advanced search with search titles only, I think the stupid rules for not being able to search shouldn't apply.

Yup. I was searching for six feet under, and under doesn't work.

Feet did, and of course Six does not.

Wow - we have a crippled search.

Poor search. Maybe we should get it a crutch?

:lol:
I also ran into the over there problem
thing is, there are other forums I post at that can search for 3 letter words and don't cut out stuff like over and there, including a site with a general discussion with 230,505 threads and 4,168,309 replies right now

Let me guess, all your results were from Adult Talk?

will we ever be able to do a three letter search? I think I killed my DS and I just tried to see if anyone else got theirs wet and of course had 0 luck.

Yeah, the previous response was wait until vBulletin 3.x.x.

The bottom of this page indicates "Powered by: vBulletin Version 3.0.13"

So I guess they didn't fix the issues? Is vBulletin the only forum software that is acceptable? You actually PAY for vB so I'd assume they'd be open to the customer feedback.

Try wet*.

Problem is many times people will use short hand like GOW = God of War or GTA = Grand Thief Auto or TP = twilight princess.