Impossible to search for 3-letter words?

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bulgie
Posts: 49
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2021 7:15 pm
Location: Seattle

Impossible to search for 3-letter words?

Post by bulgie »

Looks like the ability to search for 3-letter terms like BXA, VFD, DIN etc. is not supported, correct? Any tips or workarounds?

I wanted to know "has anyone managed to use a BXA tool holder on an AXA toolpost?" but I figgered I'd search for it first in case it's a FAQ, but the site replied that AXA and BXA are too short to search on. Oh I guess "FAQ" is too short also!

I can well imagine that including all 3-letter words would increase the difficulty of performing searches. Just wondering if there's any ability to add "important" 3-letter words to the search capability.

I realize what I'm asking for may not be feasible. Just curious. Feature request?

Thanks!
Mark
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bulgie
Posts: 49
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2021 7:15 pm
Location: Seattle

Re: Impossible to search for 3-letter words?

Post by bulgie »

Oh, just remembered something from my previous career where I managed full-text document indexing for a law firm. By default we indexed every word (no minimum length), except for "stop words" that were ignored. So rather than listing "important" 3-letter words that are worth indexing, we maintained a list of the opposite, all the words that can be ignored.

I don't intend this to be advice on how to run the site — far from it! My IT career was long ago and I never was all that good at it to begin with...

Speaking of things you can ignore: add this post to that list!
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Harold_V
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Re: Impossible to search for 3-letter words?

Post by Harold_V »

I'm pretty useless where this matter is concerned, but I've asked the owner and Marty to comment.

H
Wise people talk because they have something to say. Fools talk because they have to say something.
dorin
Posts: 606
Joined: Thu Nov 28, 2002 5:24 am

Re: Impossible to search for 3-letter words?

Post by dorin »

Good morning!

This is not a parameter easily set from the administration control panel...it also requires reconfiguring things in the SQL database.
Our SQL database is hosted by a service that does SQL databases! (So I can't easily change what they do
We do have a limit of operations/size/etc. and I am not sure what the consequences would be with the extra keys.

However, you can use google to search chaski.org, and it seems to work pretty well. See below.
2022-05-06.png
I hope this helps.

-Mike
www.chaski.com
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mklotz
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Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
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Re: Impossible to search for 3-letter words?

Post by mklotz »

Rather than trying to change the forum software, be a bit more ingenious in constructing your search.

Try to search for distinctive words that might appear in an article concerning your subject of interest. An example of this might be searching for "neodymium" to locate a remembered article concerning the use of magnets in the shop.

Extend your search phrase with words expected to occur in conjunction with your real target word. In your case, this might be a search for the phrase "AXA toolholder" (with the quotes included in the search term). This will find and highlight in red both the phrase "AXA toolholder" and the single word "toolholder". With the hits highlighted and colored it's easy to scan the results for ones that might contain the information you seek.

If you do a lot of searching, educate yourself a bit on how to construct search phrases. A good place to start is with Google's page on the subject...

https://support.google.com/websearch/an ... 6433?hl=en

Note carefully there that Google's search engine can be confined to search a particular web site (e.g. this one). Often the Google engine is superior to the local one.

I hope some of this is helpful. Good luck with your search.
Regards, Marv

Home Shop Freeware
http://www.myvirtualnetwork.com/mklotz
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