Minimum Word Length - Search String

[schizo]

You guys should remove the minimum word length in a search query. I understand that it will be more rigorous on you server... but it will lessen some reposts of the same topic.

e.g. Searching for "detect IP" in ASP.

[steelersfan88]

Advice given before was a search for "WWW" could be changed to "WWW*" to make it four chars. But I don't know how you'd do 2 characters ...

[toicontien]

No. The limit needs to be reduced. I can't even search for "change tag id" in the DHTML forum. What's a four-letter word to represent a tag's ID? For pete's sake, let's be reasonable. This is why I don't even bother to search this forum. There are so many keywords in Web Dev and programming that have fewer than four letters.

Hm. Could this be the reason the same questions get asked over and over again? New users can't search for common keywords with fewer than four letters? Hm.

Sorry. This is a little harsh, but I'm continually frustrated by this fact.

[schizo]

Originally posted by toicontien
No. The limit needs to be reduced. I can't even search for "change tag id" in the DHTML forum. What's a four-letter word to represent a tag's ID? For pete's sake, let's be reasonable. This is why I don't even bother to search this forum. There are so many keywords in Web Dev and programming that have fewer than four letters.

Hm. Could this be the reason the same questions get asked over and over again? New users can't search for common keywords with fewer than four letters? Hm.

Sorry. This is a little harsh, but I'm continually frustrated by this fact.

Exactly... it's definitely frusterating.

[steelersfan88]

I agree ... but maybe posting the same question as someone 5 minutes before could be stopped ... because tht too is annoying.

[David Harrison]

Originally posted by toicontien
No. The limit needs to be reduced. I can't even search for "change tag id" in the DHTML forum.

Well you'd reference the object in some way, for ironies sake, lets say like this:

var obj = document.getElementById("foo");

Then just do this:

obj.id = "bar";

However, back on topic. I think that the reason the min word length is 4 is because you can use "and" and "or" in the search box to be more specific. If the min word length was 3 then the server-side script might get confused between whether the user actually wanted to search for the word "and" or whether it is meant to be a joiner-togetherer word.

Admittedly it could probably be programmed in that "and" is always a joiner-togetherer word but maybe the programmers got lazy towards the end.

[russell]

The reason, I'm sure is to limit the search results, which makes a huge difference for the database server, and the presentation, as well as not showing hundreds of worthless results to the user.

If you search for "in" look how many results you'd get back, just from this paragraph in Lavalamp's last post:

However, back on topic. I think that the reason the min word length is 4 is because you can use "and" and "or" in the search box to be more specific. If the min word length was 3 then the server-side script might get confused between whether the user actually wanted to search for the word "and" or whether it is meant to be a joiner-togetherer word.

That's just one paragraph. Users could bog down the database to where the forum would be too slow for usability, if searches for things like that were allowed. Also, you wouldn't want to wait around for the presentation to figure out what to do with a few tens of thousands of results.

I don't work for webdeveloper.com, but I limit some types of searches in my own work for that reason.

[David Harrison]

Hmm, good point. I suppose a JavaScript solution could be employed to solve this though. Parse the page on the client side with innerHTML rather than on the server-side.