(Brion Vibber vibber@aludra.usc.edu): On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:
If you just let MySQL 3.x match the phrase "dime a dozen", it will return any entries that contain either "dime" or "dozen" and give higher ranks to those that contain both or lots of these words.
Yup.
It's more of an "or" than an "and", but it works very well. Is it really worth the hassle to go through the splitting and anding? Do all users really want the strict "and"?
All I know is I hear complaints when I change to the straight search method as a performance hack and people find that "John Smith" turns up mostly results like "John Wigglesworth" and "Michael Smith".
Also, the min-length thing is independent of that choice anyway. By default, MySQL won't index any word fewer than 4 letters long, and we got lots of complaints that you couldn't search for "PNG" or "XP". MySQL has to be recompiled to change that limit, and the local setting just informs the wiki software of how MySQL was compiled so it knows what it can hand to the indexer.