About searching and getting on user's nerves

[Robert9]

Normal forum, no special search index.

A user tries to search for the Western Bar in Austin

Search: Western Bar

Result: Search term to short.

Why we care about this, why we dont snip the "bar" and search for "western";
this is what a user has to do now. Go back one page and delete "bar" from the search input.

Hurra, now he can find "western bar" in the forum.


I dont want to imagine how many milliards of times this happens every year in all these xenforo forums ...

 

[Mr Lucky]

But the search for Western Bar should find western, they should not need to delete Bar

 

[Davyc]

This is a failing of MySQL, the problem disappears with Elastic Search, but not everyone can run it - especially if you're on shared hosting. I come across this all of the time on my own sites, an example would be searching for 'War of the Worlds' there are many instances of the movie and TV Shows on my Movie Bunker site, but type that into search and nada, no results. If I just type 'world' there are ten pages of results including War of the Worlds, but that becomes a chore having to potentially scroll through ten pages of results to find that one.

 

[TPerry]

I dont want to imagine how many milliards of times this happens every year in all these xenforo forums ...

And here is the main culprit.


As you can see.. mine is set at 2 (due to many niche targets being 2-3 letter/number combos)... but I have ES installed.




The default is 4. You can get (somewhat) around this by doing some mySQL config changes and rebuilding the search index... but mySQL search is mySQL search (sorely lacking).

As explained.. the search should still turn up for Western... it will just ignore the bar part.