# How do I search for movie titles that only contain short words? **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [July 29, 2008, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-search-for-movie-titles-that-only-contain-short-words/458135 "2008-07-29T20:09:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jharvey963](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/54ee81/32.png) [@jharvey963](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jharvey963)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2008, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-search-for-movie-titles-that-only-contain-short-words/458135/1 "2008-07-29T20:09:04Z")
I just tried to search Cafe Society for the new French movie entitled “Tell No One”. And yes, I used the quotes in the search box. Search wouldn’t let me search for it. So how am I supposed to know if there is already a thread for this movie if I can’t search for it? Also, is there a way to search for a phrase – like “Tell No One” – rather than single words in the phrase? Other search engines allow this. Is there a way of designating something as a phrase other than double quotes? J. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2008, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-search-for-movie-titles-that-only-contain-short-words/458135/2 "2008-07-29T20:19:55Z")
Nope, small words aren’t included in the search index. Quoting combinations won’t help, the words aren’t in there. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2008, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-search-for-movie-titles-that-only-contain-short-words/458135/3 "2008-07-29T22:09:21Z")
As it’s a new movie, about all you can do is look back a couple pages to see if any thread titles look like they refer to it. As \*\*Telemark \*\* said, the spiders that crawl the message database ignore short words completely, so it’s impossible to search for them. You’ll never find this, for example: Did you put the new RCA TV in my van? No. I put Ma’s old JVC VCR in her car. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2008, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-search-for-movie-titles-that-only-contain-short-words/458135/4 "2008-07-30T03:15:18Z")
If it was the French movie [Ne le dis à personne](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362225/), you could search on “personne” or on “Canet” (the writer/director) or some other unique longer word or name from the IMDb page for the movie. The search function in our version of vB (maybe in all versions) simply indexes all words longer than three characters that are not filtered out as “too common.” You can do a Boolean search using AND or OR to seek multiple (longer, uncommon) words, but you cannot actually search on strings. ---
**Author:** ![MsWhatsit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eb8c5e/32.png) [@MsWhatsit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MsWhatsit)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2008, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-search-for-movie-titles-that-only-contain-short-words/458135/5 "2008-07-30T03:52:36Z")
One extremely clunky but sometimes effective way of doing this is to sort the thread titles in the forum alphabetically, and then just page through to the appropriate section to see if the thread is there. Of course, this only works if the OP of the thread actually used the movie’s title at the beginning of the thread title, but still, you can sometimes turn stuff up this way. (Don’t bother trying it for “Tell No One”, though; I just checked for you and it’s not there.)