On sab, 2002-03-09 at 09:36, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Jan Hidders wrote:
No. The problem is that because of how the MySQL indexing works you cannot do that anymore. For the same reason you also cannot search for anything that is not a letter or words with less than 4 letters.
Well, I *am* a programmer, but the minute that Julie Kemp finds out about this, you're gonna be in big trouble. :-)
This is a software problem that should not be exposed to the user. The four letter limit is stupid, and should be raised to allow three letter words.
Just three? What if I'm looking up the ancient city of "Ur" or the fictional land of "Oz"? Or "Wen Ho Li"?
I'd rather there were no length limitation. (This can be adjusted by recompiling mysql and re-indexing the database. Alternatively, as Jan has suggested the index field can be munged such that two-character words would be counted as 4 characters in the indexing.)
Rather, if we're going to eliminate "useless" search terms, we should have a (per-language) list of such words.
If my search queary contains a whitespace, each separate word could still be sent to the MySQL search engine, and the resulting hit lists can be joined so that pages containing both words are listed ahead of pages that contain only one of the words.
I concur.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)