You will neat to edit your mysqul.ini file. Set ft_min_word_len to 3; i.e., [mysqld] ft_min_word_len=3 Next restart MySQL, and rebuild your full-text index using mediawiki's maintenance script maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php: php rebuildtextindex.php To speed up the process by rebuilding only MediaWiki's index, in wikidb run: REPAIR TABLE searhindex QUICK; More info here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html -----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Renner Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 6:03 AM To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Mediawiki-l] how to limit a search sting to 3 characters? Moin, at the moment, the search function in my installed mwiki only considered search requests, if the string have 5 or more characters. How can I change this to 3 characters?