4-letter minimum search? What the hell?
 

Something needs to be done about the "4-letter minimum per word" deal in the search feature. This makes it impossible to search for many movies.

Take a look at this nifty "Feedback" forum we have and you'll find a thread about this subject already going on....

sorry, thanx

Hi, welcome to the forum. The issue here is server load. The number of hits on a 3 character search is huge compared to a min 4 characters.

I am curious, how many movies will fail a four character min search string? I can think of a couple off the top of my head.

XXX & Red are two that come to mind right away. Makes it hard to search for certain TV shows, too, like 24 and Ed.

Here's a similar thread, by the way: http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....ghlight=search

UHF (one of my personal favorites, so the first that popped into my head).

:) Those were the two I was thinking of. Of course, a search for XXX might bring up other results, as will anything with the word red. Maybe searching on Tres or Rouge or Kieslowski or ?? instead of Red.

XXX, I have no idea.

24 and Ed point out that even 3 letters will restrict things. But a search for anything with ed in it will cause a lot of database searching and generate a lot of results I think.

Actually, I think wildcard-searching is disabled as well.

(Not sure if that's what you meant or not.)

I tried Much Ado About Nothing a few days ago and posted my problem about this...will there be a solution- or will it be a cross to bear??

:-)

I want a one letter search. I can't even find my own posts!

I had trouble with Midnight Run... just using "midnight" brings up a variety of responses!

Oh, does that mean you can't use ANY 3 letter words as part of your search string? Yikes.... that is suck.

P.S. Static, yeah I was not thinking of variables, just all the uses if someone was named ed.

You need to think of unique words that are likely to show up with the movie or subject in question. In this case midnight deniro would probably work.

It can also help to make sure you specify a specific forum and specify a time frame if you're looking for more recent information.

X, if you click on that little search icon right over every single one of your posts, it will bring up a list of all your posts still on the board.

:p

As is probably noted in the above linked thread (if it's the most recent discussion thread) there's also a ten character limit on words. I tried doing a search on Philadelphia for the Philadelphia Story DVD yesterday and had to go with using story hepburn stewart instead. Found a thread too.

Use as few search words as possible too.

And yes, wildcards are off, regardless of what it says on the search page.

It would be nice if the search engine could be made more flexible, but we should try to remember that this is a limitation of resources, not just because Geoff's trying to make our lives more difficult! :D

the 3-letter restriction killed my searches for 'Ice Age'. :)

My search for Farm Aid hit a few snags.

Search is so jacked up you can’t believe it. In fact, you can’t believe the results, or lack of them.

As noted in this post:
Now, given that maybe a mistake was made in his search, one would expect that “Taken” would now show up in a search, n’est ce pas?? I mean, it's more than 4 and less than 10...

It don’t. Go 'head, try it.

It’s BROKE! How many times do I have to post this? :grunt:

It’s broke.

Broken. ;) Out of curiosity, what do you want Geoff to do? It's not like he programmed the forum software himself. vBulletin 2.2.9 was released on 11/18 (DVD Talk uses 2.2.8), and the only modification made to search functionality was unrelated to the topic at hand. The developers of vBulletin are aware that there are substantial problems with the way searching is currently implemented, and they're rewriting search functionality from the bottom-up for vBulletin 3.0. That's still a ways off for public consumption, however.

Perhaps if Geoff were to rebuild the keyword index, that would help matters, but that would drag the site down to a crawl while doing so.

We've read your posts, Wizdar... well, at least I have. I've had some trouble searching for certain words as well. Geoff's a busy guy... maybe you could drop him an e-mail about the problem. He's more likely to see that than a post on the forum.

Well, that's not any more helpful than my comment(s), is it? I clearly don't have any idea what needs to be done/can be done, so what would you have me say?

When I see mods and admins just as confused as me...


And thanks for the grammer lesson. -rolleyes-

I thought I did a relatively decent job explaining the situation. At least if you didn't know where things stood before, you do now.

No problem! It's grammar, incidentally.

I think ctyner's point is very apt. The issue of restricting the search to n characters is a dvdtalk option and intended to deal with server load issues. The issue of the search software not working is not a dvdtalk issue and is a Vbb issue.

And since Ver 3.0 is now in beta and coming soon, I think the real answer is to work around the software and do the best we can until ver 3 is installed.

I say we should eliminate searches with vowels.

Solve two problems. Make users buy vowels. :)

Well, I already knew where I stood. But it doesn’t help my lack of understanding.

First, I think it’s quite rude to constantly correct one’s spelling and grammar. Peroid. Arrogance seems to me to be nonproductive.

Second, discussing the differences between v.X.x and v.Y.x is only useful if one knows what those differences are. Just how many folks are fully versed in the workings of vBulletin, or whatever the software involved is? If we were that knowledgeable, there wouldn’t be a discussion.

Perhaps you could explain why a common word like “taken” yields no results whereas “geof*” (asterisk NOT wildcard) will provide results. Is “geof*” on that keyword list? How did it get there?

I suppose you could call it a threadcrap, if you want to continue to be combative about this. But it still remains that there are problems, and helping us to understand how to get around them could be a better use of space.

Or, maybe I should start a new thread for that purpose?

Well, that's why I posted.

I think you mean perio...oh, nevermind. :) I was just kidding the first time around, and the second was just a friendly jab since you made a spelling error when complaining about my previous correction.

I'm not sure where you're going with this. I was simply pointing out that although there is a newer version of the software available, it wouldn't address the problem at hand. Geoff is doing the best he can in this respect.

The explanation is: vBulletin's search functionality is faulty. This has been mentioned in previous threads, and there's nothing Geoff can do about it aside from upgrading when the new version of the software is available. He's said as much in the past, and I'd post a link to the thread if I could find it. :D

There's not a solution other than "waiting" and possibly the resource-intensive task of rebuilding the keywords table.

If you have complaints about vBulletin's search functionality, a more effective place to do so would be at http://www.vbulletin.com/

just hit *24 or *xxx and you would get the ones you want.

Yeah, that'd be the perfect solution if we could search with wildcards. But since the wildcards no longer work either, it makes it a little tougher.

OK. I stand corrected. I thought you were gnawing on my leg instead of yanking my chain. :) & :blush:

I guess I’m still not getting my point across. The software is the software. How ‘bout some help on how to use it?

I know that it’s more than 3 and less than 11 characters.

No wildcards.

And that’s about it.

Is it case sensitive?

Does it respect multiple words?

Does a partial word produce results?

???

When you search for something that you know is there, but it doesn’t give you anything… :hscratch:

In other words, it’s broke. -ptth-

:D

Sorry if I came across as grating. It's an unavoidable side-effect of being grating, I guess. :)

That's the problem, though. :-/ Trying to work around the settings Geoff configured is one thing, but when you're saddled with buggy, faulty software that works in some instances but, as you demonstrated earlier, inconsistently doesn't in others... I don't know if there's really much we can do at this stage.

Precisely! I'd heard other vBulletin users complain about searches not working, but I meekly assumed everything was fine on DVD Talk (as in, the problems people were experiencing were the result of limitations intentionally set through the software) until recently.

It's not case sensitive...not sure what you mean by "respect multiple words" ... partial words don't work (this last one's in my FAQ I believe...which should be updated to reflect the 10 letter limit).

What if we put things together like say for 24 that aired on 12/03 we listed it in the thread title 24/12/03, or XXX/release date

It's probably tough to expect people to start writing in ways that will help forum load.

Besides, if we do that I insist we go with my approach and eliminate vowels. . .Stupid vowels.:mad:

Whts th prblm?
 

<small> </small>:p

As I pointed out in another thread, it's pretty ridiculous that you can't search for "DVD" on DVD Talk.

It makes it tough to search for threads on something like "Sony DVD Players," "DVD Player reviews," "DVD Empire Deals" etc.

You can fool around and usually find a few results, but I'm sure you miss some threads, and get some unrelated stuff. For example a search on "Sony Players" in the hardware forum brings up threads on CD players and DVD players, where before you could put "DVD" in the search box and only get threads mentioning Sony DVD players.

As I noted after that, I did not know that you could not use the 3 letter word at all. I had assumed that one had to use a minimum of 3 characters, so then one could search for SONY DVD. But I know see that is not true, and so I consider the forum search broken also.

Still, I go back to the point it's a VBB problem and we need to wait until the next release. Unless Geoff is willing to take the server load hit from a 3 character search, which I doubt he is.

I wanted to do a search for "The Way of the Gun" but guess what, not a single word in the title will work. This really needs to be fixed. We can put a man on the moon but a simple little search casues the whole thing to come crashing down.

It's a good thing letter, minimum, and word are all at least four letters, or nobody would be able to find this thread.

Just in case you hadn't noticed... We can't put a man on the moon.

We were able to at one time, but no longer due to budget constraints.

I'm not sure how much it cost NASA to put a man on the moon, but if DVD Talk had the same budget as NASA, I think Geoff could swing a three-letter word search.

Is there any way to make a list of three letter words that can be searched for? So searches could be done for movies / words like Red, xXx, UHF, mp3, but not other three letter words.

Also, why doesn't a search for others turn up anything, but a search for *others* (with astericks on each side) comes back with a list? What exactly does an asterick mean to the search engine?