think about how that search works… it’s going to rip through the database looking for strings that match “raw”, which will display a lot of hits that don’t mean anything
%grep -c raw /usr/dict/words
returns “59”, which means 59 words containing the string “raw” are in the words file for my linux box, for example:
brawl
brawler
brawling
brawn… etc etc etc (and that’s just the B’s… how many posts would have the string “raw” in them?)
like I said, it’s a lame way of limiting massive responses from searches… but it’s a fairly trivial way of keeping people from wasting CPU cycles on those searches…
if you have too few letters, you’re going to get too many hits that won’t pertain to what you’re looking for, therefore, don’t waste the compute time to find all those worthless hits…
it’s not the best way to do it, but it accomplishes the same thing… the server is spared all those returns, with a single if-then… they’re sanity checking your query for you
case in point
%grep -c a /usr/dict/words
returns “23183”… that’s 23,183 words in the /usr/dict/words file that contain the string “a”… do you really want the server to respond to that? with every thread that contains an “a”… I’m no statistician, but I’d bet that would be extremely close to the number of threads ever posted (maybe someone, somewhere, started a thread saying “lets not use the letter before B, hint hint”… though I doubt that would work)
if you want some more reading on regular expressions “sed & awk” by O’Reilly publishing will give you a basic primer… past that, the “camel book” also by O"Reilly touches on the subject… past that, there are text books dedicated to the subject… once you understand how regular expressions work, then you can complain about one of your searches being too ubiquitious…
(normally I’d apologize for being this informative/cruel, but it’s the pit, so fuck it.)
read a damn book… learn how to use that “magic box” in front of you… then if you see a problem, you can complain… don’t complain about a web site that keeps you from doing something stupid.
(ps… try doing a search for “raw food” or atleast “uncooked”, raw occures too much in standard words to be a good search term… maybe it’s smart enough to let you try " raw "… the spaces on either end should really limit the hits, and might placate the string length requirement)
damn that got long… long week, long rant…
bye all… back to lurking
