Fulltext vs vBulletin internal search

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  • Michelle
    Senior Member
    • Jul 2005
    • 408
    • 3.7.x

    Fulltext vs vBulletin internal search

    What are the advantages and the disadvantages of each method?
  • HenrikHansen
    Senior Member
    • Jul 2004
    • 155
    • 3.8.x

    #2
    Yeah, good question. I would also like to know a bit more about this.
    Europanet.dk

    Comment

    • MrNase
      Senior Member
      • Jun 2003
      • 3575
      • 3.8.x

      #3
      You are talking about the MySQL Fulltext Search?

      One of it's disadvantage is, that by default it doesn't work on small words (length 3? or less).

      One advantage is that you have one vB table less.
      That's the end of that!

      Comment

      • Kiwi76
        Member
        • May 2006
        • 81
        • 3.5.x

        #4
        Not 100% sure on it, but I think another advantage (of fulltext) is that you can use, for example, "vBadvanced and Templates" (notice the "and") as a search term and get results that include only both terms, rather than every result that has either or, which could turn up plenty of useless things on templates when you may only want a specific thing on templates related to vBadvanced.

        Comment

        • Wayne Luke
          vBulletin Technical Support Lead
          • Aug 2000
          • 73976

          #5
          You can use Boolean under vBulletin's builtin search as well.

          Fulltext
          Pros
          Less PHP resources used because the indexing takes place in MySQL.
          No need to maintain the postindex and word tables which can take up a lot of space.
          Natural Language and Phrase searching is available.
          Can Sort by relevancy for better results
          Default search in vBulletin's latest versions.
          Can support more searches per minute.
          Searches can take better advantage of MySQL's query caching.

          Cons
          Less Flexible Indexing, especially on Shared Servers. Changing parameters requires shutting down MySQL, dropping indexes and rebuilding them.
          Fewer control parameters within vBulletin.
          Rigid Stopword list as an external file.

          vBulletin Builtin Search
          Pros
          Not reliant on your MySQL version.
          Can be easily manipulated in the Admin CP including adding words under the minimum character limit or changing that limit.

          Cons
          Resource heavy, especially building the index.
          Indexing must be done before post is inserted to database and can result in errors on overwhelmed systems.
          Search Results can cause database errors if there are too many hits.
          Large tables must be maintained manually for proper usage.
          No Natural Language or Phrase based searching.
          Easy to bring down large boards with multiple searches.
          Translations provided by Google.

          Wayne Luke
          The Rabid Badger - a vBulletin Cloud demonstration site.
          vBulletin 5 API

          Comment

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