Forum: Can't search for "nconvert"

[Peter2]

I tried to search for "nconvert" (without quotes..), and got:

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: nconvert.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

Bug or feature?

[cday]

As the basic phpBB search tool has always seemed very limiting, some years ago XnTriq added a Google search tool as an additional forum search option.

To use the tool, click on the round icon to the right of the standard search tool, which will open a search page with the Google search tool already selected in a dropdown. Then without entering any search terms, press the Search button immediately below, which slightly confusingly will open a further search window in which the search terms can be entered.

But to be honest, I normally simply search using the standard web browser Google search, which seems to usually be quite effective at finding what I am searching for. The Google search tool on the forum may well have an advantage, though.

[XnTriq]

Hello Peter2

As mentioned by cday, phpBB's built-in search leaves much to be desired.

Here you can define what search backend will be used for indexing posts and performing searches. You can set various options that can influence how much processing these actions require. Some of these settings are the same for all search engine backends.

[…]

Search backend
phpBB allows you to choose the backend that is used for searching text in post contents. By default the search will use phpBB’s own fulltext search.

• Sphinx Fulltext
• MySQL Fulltext
• phpBB Native Fulltext
• PostgreSQL Fulltext

One of the big differences for me is:

Sphinx is the fastest but it doesnt work on Shared Hosts.

phpBB Native is maybe the one that will give better search results BUT if you've let say a large board, let say 300Mb of posts table can create a 600mb of search table. (It will depend the configuration on ACP too) But with this one I can search for words with 3, 2 and even 1 letter.

MySQL Fulltext just create an index at database so it go to 2mb maximum compared to the 600mb of phpBB native lol, but the downside is that it can be slower at give the results, but the real bad thing at least for me is that it is limited to words with 4 letters at minimum. I wanted to be able to search too words with 3 letters as “men” and even 2 letters (in my case), its crucial to find information on my board.
This MySQL limitation I guess could be fixed on dedicate server, but on share hosts you cant change the 4 letters limitation .

About PostgreSQL this is if I used that kind of sql but I use MySQL instead, so I never new about this neither how it works.

We use phpBB Native Fulltext (default). Common word threshold is set to 5%. Terms like “nconvert” and “xnview” fall within the threshold.

Words which are contained in a greater percentage of all posts will be regarded as common. Common words are ignored in search queries. Set to zero to disable. Only takes effect if there are more than 100 posts. If you want words that are currently regarded as common to be reconsidered you have to recreate the index.

My OpenSearch plug-in was purged whenever the forum was updated to the newest version of phpBB, …

In addition to the search function that comes with phpBB, the forum can now be searched with Google's integrated Custom Search Engine.

… which is one of the reasons why we decided to install the Google SiteSearch extension:

Adds a Google Search box to your Forum. The responsive style uses the default “Advanced Search” Icon to access the Advanced Search where the Google Search is also available. The Admin can choose whether the search appears in the Header, Navbar or on the Index underneath Breadcrumbs (which also adds the default search). The Extension is supplied with a “search the whole web” Google Search Engine ID, which can be replaced with your own custom ID if you wish. The results are shown in a Forum page.

The built-in search isn't useless, IMO. You can Search for author and Search in forums.

[Peter2]

@cday and @XnTriq

thanks for your reply. Certainly helpful for many users.