Search doesn't works!

[musicoff]

Hi everyone.
We're experiencing serious issues with Search: threads that exist and that we can see in the boards are not found using the search engine (both simple and advanced, searching titles or all content, setting for user or not).
Obiouvsly this is not a condition we can to sustain, since our forum contains over 125k topics and almost a million and a half posts.
Since we got back online (a few weeks ago) we executed clear and rebuild search indexes three times, even from cli, without any change.
We migrated from SMF to a vB 4.2.3 (patch level 2) and then upgraded to 5.2.5. "Search type" is DB.

Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance.

[musicoff]

No ideas for this?

[Wayne Luke]

What search terms are you using? Terms need to be three characters or more.

[musicoff]

What search terms are you using? Terms need to be three characters or more.

We are using several combination, the shortest word we've tried is "ciao", which is very used in titles for presentation threads: ie, serching for this word in thread's titles of our presentation board, we would expect dozens and dozens of results, but we only receive nine.

[Wayne Luke]

Ciao? No accents?

Can you run this query directly against your database using phpMyAdmin or whatever other tool you have available?

select count(nodeid) from searchtowords_c where wordid =(select wordid from words where word='ciao') AND is_title=1;

[musicoff]

No accents?

Nope, is the italian "hello".

Can you run this query directly against your database using phpMyAdmin or whatever other tool you have available?

Result is "11".
If I correctly understood what the query is asking, it is absolutely not possible that in our db there are only 11 thread titles with that word...

[Wayne Luke]

It is possible, that only 11 topics with the word in the title are indexed. Please rebuild your search index. You can do this in the AdminCP under Maintenance -> General Update Tools. Or if you are knowledgeable with your server's command line, you can upload the searchindex.php file from your do_not_upload folder and run it with PHP at the command line.

[musicoff]

Please rebuild your search index. You can do this in the AdminCP under Maintenance -> General Update Tools. Or if you are knowledgeable with your server's command line, you can upload the searchindex.php file from your do_not_upload folder and run it with PHP at the command line.

We've just did it at least three times, the last running searchindex.php from cli...

[Wayne Luke]

Can you run this query:

select count(*) from node where lower(title) like '%ciao%';

[musicoff]

Can you run this query:

select count(*) from node where lower(title) like '%ciao%';

Result to this is 20906.

I've even tried to execute a search on word "Ciao" (with the uppercase c) and results is 100; seems a round figure, is there a maximum number limit for user search?

[Wayne Luke]

Yes, there is a limit on the search results returned for performance reasons. The default value is 500 results. You can change this at Settings -> Options -> Message Searching Options. You can change it but I don't recommend setting it too high.

That Ciao and ciao returns different results sounds like a bug. They should return the same.

[musicoff]

Yes, there is a limit on the search results returned for performance reasons. The default value is 500 results. You can change this at Settings -> Options -> Message Searching Options. You can change it but I don't recommend setting it too high.

Now I remember, we've set it that way when we started to configuring after migration.

That Ciao and ciao returns different results sounds like a bug. They should return the same.

Cancel this, I confused search results, too many browser tabs :|

20906 posts that cointains the word "ciao" is an adequate amount for our forum, 9 topic with that word in title is not possible.
Is it any way to replicate the search "keyword only in title" with a db query?

Apart from that, other accurate research do not return results despite the thread exist.

[Wayne Luke]

The query in post 5 would replicate a basic search on the topic title. Only topics have titles in vBulletin 5. Replies and comments do not have titles. If you use any topic prefixes, these are not indexed.

To be honest, I would recommend excluding the word 'ciao' from the search index altogether. It is too common on your site to provide meaningful results. Like if you searched for vBulletin on this site. Or the word 'hello' on an English site. The word 'hello' is excluded by default. The results wouldn't be meaningful.

[Wayne Luke]

As I said before your search engine needs to be reindexed. If I search for 'ringraziamento' on your site, I get no results. However, this topic exists:

https://yourdomain/forum/comunicazioni-importanti/bacheca/36972-un-saluto-ed-un-ringraziamento-a-f4b10-rbino-befunk-e-ciosper/

This tells me that the database isn't completely indexed for some reason.

[glennrocksvb]

Like if you searched for vBulletin on this site. Or the word 'hello' on an English site. The word 'hello' is excluded by default. The results wouldn't be meaningful.

It depends. In most cases, hello might not return meaningful results but for translation or language sites, it does. Also in programming language sites, it might also be meaningful if you want to search for "hello world" code samples.