Is there any way that I can search the forum for the term 'on-one'.. I've tried all kinda tricks with wildcards, and can't make it work.

I've seen that a lot of sites don't let you search for two-letter terms. Is it to cut server-load?

It's about databases and search indexes.

The explanation: A search index is a record of every word and which rows in the database (posts) hold those words. Search indexes are highly efficient as instead of searching every row (post) for the word, the database will look at the word in the index (like a book index) and then see a list of
rows (posts) that hold the word. Indexes only work if they are smaller than the database table that they are the index for. So to keep the index small and fast, the database people choose to exclude common words, otherwise the index will contain an entry for "the" and it would point to tens of thousands of posts.

Both the words "on" and "one" are in the exclude list:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...stopwords.html

So you can't search for them as they get skipped in the search as being too common.

Tags solve this. Tags aren't an index to a database table, they are their own table. You can have three letter words as tags and it should be fine.

So the key to finding things with very few letters or that are very common is to tag things with the words, so that later you can find stuff.

http://www.londonfgss.com/tags/on-one.html

See?

Unfortunately only one thread has been tagged so far... but that's your answer.

This might be a way of getting it to work, but some index size testing would be needed:

(from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...ne-tuning.html)

"If you want to change the set of characters that are considered word characters, you can do so in two ways. Suppose that you want to treat the hyphen character ('-') as a word character. Use either of these methods:

• Modify the MySQL source: In myisam/ftdefs.h, see the true_word_char() and misc_word_char() macros. Add '-' to one of those macros and recompile MySQL.
• Modify a character set file: This requires no recompilation. The true_word_char() macro uses a “character type” table to distinguish letters and numbers from other characters. . You can edit the <ctype><map> contents in one of the character set XML files to specify that '-' is a “letter.” Then use the given character set for your FULLTEXT indexes.

After making the modification, you must rebuild the indexes for each table that contains any FULLTEXT indexes."

and i presume that an index rebuild requires a bit of downtime?

If I kill the server, this is all your fault.

seems fair :-)

OK, Just looked... and I'm not doing that.

#1 requires re-compilation and for maintenance I'd rather stick with the CPU optimised build that is in the ubuntu repositories.

#2 doesn't require a re-compilation, but the Xml file you have to edit is scary. It basically defines the alphabet for that locale and the entire database.

The problem I have with #2 is that changing the alphabet may have consequences beyond the fulltext indexes. And there is no documentation to say what that may be. Would making '-' a letter impact in any way on the security given that '--' is a Sql comment and can be used in shaping a Sql injection query.

So... tags will solve this.

Wise you are, yes, yes.

I agree, particularly since I have already sold that On-One Pompino :-)

why would anyone want to search for on-one anyway?

shit bikes made by a bloke with a bad attitude

hohow would they know that with out searching and finding you think that :P

shit you're right, better get t-shirts done