I tried to search for the words movies and alone, and the search function simply retreived all threads containing the word movies. Then I tried a search for just the word alone, and got no results. I was searching entire messages, not just titles, and I changed the date restriction to “any date.”
It’s impossible that there are no posts containing the word “alone.” Is “alone” some kind of special reserved search word?
Did you search & see if your post you just wrote shows up?
The search engine is pretty freaky sometimes. (Also, no can search for 3 letter words, this is because it would make the database too big.)
Did you search & see if your post you just wrote shows up?
The search engine is pretty freaky sometimes. (Also, no can search for 3 letter words, this is because it would make the database too big.)
Interesting…alone doesn’t show up. Not even when just searching this forum.
As handy said, the search engine’s freaky, and having one of those spells with this. I put in a search for other five-letter words that have appeared in this thread: “tried” and “forum”. Only the latter showed up in the search. Quite odd.
Bizarre. I just tried searching for “anyway” and “always”. Nothing.
One unusual thing I noticed is that when I search for these words that should be generating results, I don’t get that intermediary “Your search is in progress” screen. I get taken right from the screen with the form on it to the “Sorry, no matches” message.
No idea why this happens, however you can search for the word “alone” if you stick an asterisk at either end:
alone
Is it possible that there are so many search matches that nothing comes up? That would make sense in regards to the “anyway” and “always” searches, too.
“Tried” not showing up would make sense too…it would have thousands of matches, whereas “forum” isn’t exactly hugely popular. I don’t think it has anything to do with word size (it’s not size that counts, but how frequently you use it, har har…not funny). I’m betting the search is just too broad for the engine to handle, and it just bumps you to the “no matches” screen by default.
Even though I left it as “yesterday or newer”, solely for this forum? I’d have thought that was the least broad a scope of all. Hmm …
Usually, anyway, I search for word-terms that aren’t all that common. Usually proper nouns.
You can search for: “straightdope alone” (no quotes) & get some results. I dont know if they index the forum often.
I’m pretty sure that’s not it. I don’t advise that anyone try it, but it’s fully possible to make searches that turn up thousands of results.
Maybe posts take a little bit to get added to the search index? That wouldn’t explain the original problem of not finding “alone” in a search, but it might explain why some of the other searches for words used in this thread didn’t turn up.
No, any post that is made is either added to the Search Index at post time, or else it is not added at all. The only exception is if the Board is having serious problems, in which case it is possible (but unlikely) that only part of the post would be parsed into the search index. It typically is an all-or-nothing affair.
Many words are excluded from the Search index by default. These words are listed in a file called “badwords.php”. An example of some of the words in it are:
$badwords["a"]=1;
$badwords["a's"]=1;
$badwords["able"]=1;
$badwords["about"]=1;
$badwords["above"]=1;
$badwords["according"]=1;
$badwords["accordingly"]=1;
$badwords["across"]=1;
$badwords["actually"]=1;
$badwords["after"]=1;
$badwords["afterwards"]=1;
$badwords["again"]=1;
$badwords["against"]=1;
$badwords["ain't"]=1;
$badwords["all"]=1;
$badwords["allow"]=1;
$badwords["allows"]=1;
$badwords["almost"]=1;
$badwords["alone"]=1;
$badwords["along"]=1;
…and so forth.
Note that “alone” is in the list. Now, an Admin with server access can set the flag to be “0”, which inicates that a word is not flagged as bad, or they can delete the entry, or add new ones. After discovering that the words “forum”, “post”, “board”, etc. were taking up a disproportionate amount of space in the index, I added them to my index.
Since “alone” isn’t indexed, what happens when you search for “alone*” like cazzle suggested? The software doesn’t start a full text search of all posts in the selected ranges, does it? Or does it?
Wow. I need to confirm some things, but using the asterisks appears to do just what you say it does. Fascinating…
How did you get the badwords.php index?
bluecanary, since Anthracite hasn’t been back to your question yet, I’ll attempt a speculation.
Anthracite has her own message board that runs the same software as the SDMB. As a consequence, she has goddess-like powers to access the information she shared. She noted that these were the default settings for the software.
Hope that helps.
Yup. My Board I run is available via the “WWW” below my post. It runs the same exact version of software as the SDMB.
The “badwords.php” doesn’t have any sensitive info in it, nor is it Board code - it’s just a honkin’ big list of words. So I felt safe in posting it.
I honestly don’t have an answer to the asterisks question - I was involved in Moderator selection issues this weekend. I will ask on the vBulletin developers site to see if I can get a better answer.
As Anthracite said - the word alone is not indexed because of its presence in the file of words not to be indexed.
Why does alone* work? Because it finds threads where you have the word alone followed by any number of non-blank characters. So “alone” by itself would not be indexed, but “aloneness” would be.
I see now what was being asked. I can’t get the search string “alone” to return a thread which only has alone appearing as “alone”. If anyone else can, then it would need investigation. Otherwise, I think everything is behaving as I said it was.