Why under 3 letter search block?

[salamanderrake]

Why is there a block on searching words with less then 4 letters especially when searching with more then one word? I was trying to search for Doom3 bfg and it wouldn't let me search. I was trying to see if tdm would work with bfg since the source code was released.

Edited February 2, 2013 by salamanderrake

[grayman]

I don't know the answer to the search limit, but TDM doesn't work with Doom 3 BFG.

[snobel]

If you're searching the public forums, you can use google:

 

Doom3 bfg site:http://forums.thedarkmod.com

 

To search a thread, add the thread number from the url:

 

Doom3 bfg site:http://forums.thedarkmod.com inurl:14492

 

...will find your post above.

[demagogue]

It's just something the forum code limits. Searching for 3 letter or smaller words often overwhelms simple search algorithms, so they just simplify things by making it off limits to search words that small. Nothing to do except what snobel mentioned, just search on Google specifying this site.

[i30817]

string substring searching uses a funky algorithm, by 20-years state of the art, that gets more efficient, the longer he input (the string to search).

 

That's the reason.

Edited February 2, 2013 by i30817

[Tels]

The usual way forums implemented is that every post, every user account etc. is stored as text in a huge database of entries. To search this giant mass of text, you have to either:

 

* crawl through everything - that is impossible once the forum has more than 100000 posts etc. as it would take way too long

* use an index. The index knows which word is where and lets you find things quicker. The problem with the index, tho, is that it can grow rather large, too. Imagine how many different "words" are in the forum, esp. es the texts get longer etc.

 

So usualy the indexing is limited to words of 4 letters and up, and doesn't include things like "..." etc.

 

Google has bigger indexes because they have a lot more computing power than this simple forum server.

 

The indexing can be changed with the database, but I'm not sure if it is that simple for that forum. And I can't do it, anyway.