Search in this thread

[hollystyles]

I have just noticed the search function doesn't appear to work when you choose 'in this thread' in the drop down list. I tried to use it for the rhyming posting game, for a word I knew had been used. It returned no results.

[Dani]

The search isn't completely literal. I just ran a thread search in this thread for 'daniweb irc' and it correctly returned the first post.

[hollystyles]

The search isn't completely literal

That's an interesting phrase for a search function, it obviously likes you more than me, tee hee :)

I guess one word posts are not indexed or something because it's just not worth the overhead? I could understand that.

[Dani]

All posts are indexed but the the actual searching algorithm is set up to favor short phrase queries over single-word literal terms. For example, suppose I were to do a search of the word "interesting" ... how many posts out of nearly half a million would be returned to make that search of any value?

[hollystyles]

Ok then shouldn't it say something like:
"Sorry buddy, that's gonna return too many results, you're gonna choke. Gimme a phrase instead"?

Rather than "Sorry nothing matched your search" which is not correct is it?

And I'm not trying to search half a million posts for a single word, just trying to navigate a longish thread. I'm reading a thread and thinking of responding and I think "ooh didn't thingy say something about... what page was that on?"

I know search functions are a pain to implement I have engineered a few myself. So i'm not trying to make anything out of this and maybe I'm alone. But, I figured if I search for a word that exists I should get a result even if it's to say "there's too many please be more specific" I mean surely that's black and white? am I mad?

[Dani]

The thing is that I didn't write the search algorithm and I'm just completely guessing its reason for not liking your search query but liking mine.