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4.1 Search functionality - bring back AND searches!


wohali

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Posted
7 hours ago, cyndisa said:

Also, we have a significant need to be able to search for words of fewer than 4 characters.  In previous versions of IP.Board, this was possible.  In IPS 4, it is not.  Are there any plans to bring back customization features (in the ACP) for the search engine?

Im able to search with 3 characters. 2 gives no results. 

Posted
1 hour ago, cyndisa said:

Could you point me to that option in the ACP?    IPS support says that 4 is as low as it goes.

I did not change anything. It supports 3 characters search by default. 

Posted

Interesting, because IPS support says 4 letters, and we have numerous (I can't say "all" because I've not tested all) 3 letter words in titles that the search engine will not query.

Posted

4 characters is the default mysql fulltext configuration which is what IPS will be basing their support on I guess. In previous versions you could change a setting in the ACP but it didn't do anything if you went lower that what mysql was configured with. Some hosts, especially self hosted, drop this limit to 3 or 2. But it's a mysql configuration rather than an IPS one. And you have to rebuild all your full text indexes when you do it.

Check your /etc/my.cnf file for "ft_min_word_len"

 

 ft_min_word_len

Command-Line Format --ft_min_word_len=#
System Variable Name ft_min_word_len
Variable Scope Global
Dynamic Variable No
Permitted Values Type integer
Default 4
Min Value 1

The minimum length of the word to be included in a FULLTEXT index.

Posted

Thanks much for the info, AutoItScript!  I'll look into this.  :)

Edit: Being IPS hosted, we don't have that option.  :(  It would be nice to see it included for hosted accounts.  We used to have cPanel access, but no more.  If we can't get to it that way, then a nice easy ACP option would be appreciated!  :smile:

Posted

@AutoItScript that variable is for MyIsam. For Innodb is this one: innodb_ft_min_token_size. 

The default, at least in MariaDb for that one, is 3. That's why i can search for 3 characters. 

So,  probably IPS hosting is using MyIsam for the Search table. 

Posted

It works fine but be aware that the rebuilding of the index may take awhile and while it is rebuilding search will not work. The rebuild is also a background process like all others so after you click yes to rebuild the table you may want to head out to the dashboard and start processing immediately. On a live site strongly consider doing this in the middle of the night when no one is around - especially if you are on shared hosting (or even a VPS).

As for performance of search afterward we'll probably need to wait for people to start posting real-world examples but it shouldn't be vastly different than what you have when set to 3/4 characters. Performance is going to be more affected by how well your MySql install is configured, memory dedicated to caching, and the CPU on your server.

I haven't gone live with 4.0 yet on my communities but have been testing with local WAMP copies.  InnoDB tables, set to two character search, NTFS (Win 10 WAMP install - noted as Linux storage bits may differ in size). I have also not altered InnoDB to remove any stopwords (that's a whole other ball of wax...) 

For a community that has about 135,000 posts across 100,000 or so topics I have the following sizes after the two-character index rebuild:

posts table = 294 megabytes
topics table = 94 megabytes
search index = 205 megabytes

Reasonable all around. 

If I want to search for "Audi R8" and don't feel like typing in Audi and just go with R8 the search works just fine. This is of course with 4.0.13.

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Posted
14 minutes ago, RevengeFNF said:

Were the updates to Search applied today? At first sight, im not seeing nothing different.

A few were but we're still fine tuning the interface and algorithms so we will update more tomorrow.

Posted

Was hoping to see ability of Topics search to return results as topic titles, not posts and multiple posts in that topic. When searching for a certain topic or just seeking a topic of a certain subject you don't need to see 67 posts in the same topic, especially when it is not the one you are looking for. What could be result #2 could be buried on page 11. This has been missing since 3.4, is it returning?

Needed:

View as topic list
View as posts

Think about the way you browse a forum. What if all the posts were mixed with topics and you couldn't view the list of titles? I hope this returns to search soon.

Posted

@chilihead are you sure? I searched for the word "Search" only in titles, and it showed this topic only once and not multiple times.

@Charles When we search only in topic titles and sort by date, it will sort by creation date of the topic and not by last update date. 

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