When I try to search for a three-letter word on IMDB, i get a message saying that the word is “too short”. Google allows three-letter word searches, so why not IMDB?
In fact, the Internet Movie Database does allow for three-letter searches; it’s the Straight Dope Message Board (and many others) that don’t allow it. I believe it has something to do with straining the search function because there are so many words that are only three letters long, many of which wouldn’t be relevant to the actual search.
Yep, that’s right. Allowing searches for three letter words would put a great strain on the system, or so I am given to understand.
The shorter the allowable search, the greater the database and accompanying index size. The necessary storage space and processing power goes up rapidly if you include short words. 4 characters as the minimum seach value is often chosen as a compromise between usefulness and processing overhead. It’s too bad that we have many 3-letter acronyms in the language.
Exactly how much strain would be imposed on the system has never been determined, IIRC.
I thought it was because we’d crash the board searching for words that end in -gry.
I thought it was to keep me from doing vanity searches. 
That I couldn’t easily search on my three-letter ID was one of the reasons I changed it.
Exactly the reason Knead tries to encourage people to refer to Knead as Knead rather than as KTK. 
There’s a separate attempt to discourage Kneady, but that’s an unrelated position.
How difficult would it be to allow three letter searches but exclude the biggies, like “the” and “and?” Google regularly omits the common ones, but allows the rest.
For one answer, look to the OP:
Word count: 33
Number of 3-letter words: 6 (excluding “the”)
Percentage of 3-letter words: 18.2
Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like an awfully significant percentage.
Number of unique 6-letter words: 5
Percentage of 6-letter words: 15.15
Still high.
Just saying.
Somedays I just wish I could enter “TMI” into the search feature, then read all day long.
Folks, the search function on this board is, for whatever reason, pretty wonky as it is. It also apparently causes the board to go into a funk where it refuses to talk to people for minutes on end at times. Adding anything to the function that would increase the load on the engine is what we call a Bad Idea. :eek:
Exceptions to the 3-letter rule can be specified in the settings, if the need arises. For example, if the messageboard was about web design, they could list “CSS” or “PHP” as acceptable search terms, while the rest of the 3-lettered words would continue to be overlooked.
Aha! So we CAN begin politicking to have “TMI” made searchable?
Sailboat
Many boards exclude three-letter English conjunctions and pronouns from being indexed by the search engine.