XF 1.5 Length of Search String?

[vFranky]

Hallo,

I have set the minimum length of searchable strings to 4. But we have lots of product names which are even smaller. What can I do? Would XenForo Enhanced Search offer more options which can help here?

Kind regards and thank you in advance
Frank

 

[Chris D]

Yes, there's no minimum word length with Elastic Search.

 

[vFranky]

But is some customization possible with Elastic Search, for example exclude wordlists like "the, we, can ..."?
Does anyone use Elastic Search?

 

[Chris D]

Just to be clear, I was talking about XenForo Enhanced Search. Lots of people use it, we use it here. It is based around an application called Elastic Search which is much more advanced than the built in MySQL search. From our product page:

XenForo Enhanced Search - $50 (extension $10)
XenForo Enhanced Search is designed to give significantly better search performance and additional search options to your users. It is built on top of elasticsearch, which is in turn built on top of Lucene. This gives excellent performance, even with millions of pieces of content. Elasticsearch allows nearly infinite scalability and redundancy by silently allowing searches to be run across multiple servers. Additionally, you benefit from a very small stopword list and no minimum word length, allowing nearly any search to return meaningful results. Elasticsearch also provides support for returning results based on how relevant they are to your search. You can select relevancy ordering on the advanced search page.

You must have access to install elasticsearch 0.16.0 or newer and XenForo 1.3.0 or newer to use this add-on. Only customers with dedicated servers or VPSes will be able to use it.

Access to Enhanced Search updates and support is included as long as your XenForo license is current for support and updates. When extending your XenForo license, the cost of add-on extensions will be automatically added to the base cost.

 

[vFranky]

Thank you!

Is it a lot effort to get it up and running?
Is it possible to switch back to normal search if necessary?

 

[Chris D]

There are guides on how to install Elastic Search floating around the RM or forum I think. They may actually be authored by @Slavik.

Yes, you can switch back to normal search by disabling the Enhanced Search add-on.

 

[vFranky]

What do I have to buy to use XenForo Enhanced Search?

a) XenForo Enhanced Search License!
b) some Product from Elastic Search?
c) ?

 

[Chris D]

a)

Elastic Search is free - you just need to ensure you have the access to your server to be able to install it.

 

[vFranky]

Thank you! Enhanced Search is up and running!

Question => Are there any operators which I can use in the searchbox, AND or OR for example? Or something like that?
Are there parameters for optimization? Or some useful configuration or optimization?

 

[Mike]

Optimization is really only within Elasticsearch, though you can choose the "optimize index" option in the Elasticsearch Setup area to help reduce memory usage.

AND is the default operator, you can use "-" for NOT and "|" to separate OR options.

 

[vFranky]

Is there any documentation for usage we can use?

 

[Mike]

I'm not clear on the exact documentation you're referring to. For XF Enhanced Search in general, or search support? In terms of search support, beyond "quoted strings", what I mentioned previously is all we support.

 

[vFranky]

Thank you!

 

[vFranky]

Question => Is it possible to use Elasticsearch for more then one XenForo installation on one and the same server? Do each forum use own Elasticsearch data?

 

[Mike]

Yes, each installation would go into a separate index automatically.

 

[vFranky]

perfect, thank you