[Forum] Search Issue

[G-man]

Have double checked search settings in Control Panel. Search will not come up with any 3 letter words with or without * in front or behind. Yes I do have that feature turned on.

I have even added the words to the "Words to be Included Despite Character Limit" list.

[G-man]

Bump.
I have spent an entire day looking into this. I have reindexed the database. Nothing works.

[ulitka]

same with me, the search is not working for 3 letters words.
Also, for some reason, when I do re-indexing , the scrip is skipping very fast all the post below 86000 (with 1000 posts per batch it took about a minute) .. And after 86000th post re-indexing becomes pretty slow (about 4 hours to index all the posts from 86000 to 490000) ..

[Lynne]

By default, fulltext search has a minimum word length of 4 characters. You would have to change your mysql variable in your my.cnf file and rebuild the search index to change this. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...ne-tuning.html

[ulitka]

Lynne, you are absolutely right. I've added the following in my my.cnf

[mysqld]
......
ft_min_word_len=3

and then restarted the mysqld, cleared the old index and recreated it again.
NOTE: it is important not only to recreate the index, but wipe it first.

Now I can search for the 3 letters words. Also, the size of the database (because of the index) got increased almost twice. In my case: ~1.5 GB with 4 letters limit index to ~ 2.6 GB with 3 letters limit.

[G-man]

Lynne thank you for getting back with me on this. There are two sections under Options in the Admin Control Panel though that appear to allow you to by-pass the 3-letter limit without growing your index or making changes to the cnf:

1. Words to be Included Despite Character Limit
2. Allow Search Wild Cards

Under the first one we have filled it with common 3 letter words that our members search for and under the secondone we have it turned on. Neither seem to have any effect on the search system. Why have them in the Options if they do not do anything? What am I missing here?

[Lynne]

If you look at the heading for those two sections, they are for vBulletin Internal Search. vB4 uses Fulltext search (unless you install Sphinx, then you can use that). So those two sections don't have any effect on search in vB4.

[ArchAngelz]

Is there any way to use vBulletin's Internal Search for vb4.0? Our host doesn't permit the changing of the search parameters to run 3 characters and hence, we would need to set it internally in vBulletin's options; just the way we used to be able to do it in vbulletin 3.

[TJMagoo]

I am also having search problems. I entered the term damage report in the search and tried to look for threads or posts with these words. It found one thread from 2003. I know there is a thread with this as it's titled from 2005 but it never found it. Does this sound like I need to do the above to fix this on my forum? I am running 4.01.

[Lynne]

No, you may not use the old vBulletin Internal Search on vB4. You may only run the mySQL FullText search (or Sphinx, if you install that).

If search is not returned all results, then made sure every Forum has "Index New Posts in Search Engine" set to Yes and you ran Update Counter > Rebuild Search Indexes successfully until it was done (check to see if you have more rows in table searchcore than in table post or check your error_logs to see if there were any errors when you ran this).

[ArchAngelz]

I just saw this before replying in the other thread; maybe we can continue here since there are more points raised in this thread on this topic.

If the old vbulletin internal search cannot be used, why continue to have options in the AdminCP which has the bracketed bit "vBulletin Internal Search"? Won't that confuse the users?

Also, isn't removing vb internal search a step backwards given that not everyone who runs vbulletin has the ability to modify the my.cnf file, especially those on shared hosting plans?

No, you may not use the old vBulletin Internal Search on vB4. You may only run the mySQL FullText search (or Sphinx, if you install that).

If search is not returned all results, then made sure every Forum has "Index New Posts in Search Engine" set to Yes and you ran Update Counter > Rebuild Search Indexes successfully until it was done (check to see if you have more rows in table searchcore than in table post or check your error_logs to see if there were any errors when you ran this).

[Lynne]

If the old vbulletin internal search cannot be used, why continue to have options in the AdminCP which has the bracketed bit "vBulletin Internal Search"? Won't that confuse the users?

Unfortunately, yes, this is confusing users. :/

Also, isn't removing vb internal search a step backwards given that not everyone who runs vbulletin has the ability to modify the my.cnf file, especially those on shared hosting plans?

Unfortunately, I can't answer that for you. I do know that they needed to go to Full Text searching in order for you to be able to search the different content types.

[TJMagoo]

If search is not returned all results, then made sure every Forum has "Index New Posts in Search Engine" set to Yes and you ran Update Counter > Rebuild Search Indexes successfully until it was done (check to see if you have more rows in table searchcore than in table post or check your error_logs to see if there were any errors when you ran this).

All of my forums already have the Index New Posts in Search Engine checked as yes. I'm running the rebuild search indexes now...