And why don’t we have it already?
Because it would require much more indexing, using up more space and memory and slowing down the servers. Searches are done on indexs that need to be updated regularly. If you require strings of 3 chars to be indexed it’s going to make things worse on the site. 4 chars and greater is a good balance between usefulness and performance.
It would be nice, though, if we could petition to have certain three-character terms that are unlikely to be terribly frequent (e.g., GRE, XM, IBM) added into the index. But it’s not something I view as essential.
I do believe the current settings do not allow selected terms, it’s based on number alone. It’s all or nothing.
Fair enough.
And why does searching for “Titles Only” take so much longer then “Entire post”?