http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=176992

First off, I know that there are currently some problems with Super Search, and that I'm better off searching using thepen's setup for a lot of searching. However, this isn't something I encountered using Super Search, but just a vanilla search.

The other day, I was having some questions about e-mail, which lead me to questions about MX Lookups, and grinder was of real help in that regard - there's a reply in the MX Lookups post. However, I got my help late in the evening, and I didn't mark down the node I was looking for, or the root node or anything.

So, I came back, and I punched in MX Lookup - without the S. I was hoping that MX Lookups would come up for me - id 173274, but I got a bunch of results that didn't say MX at all.

I heard someone say once that the way search works, is by searching each individual term in the search string, then merging the results, or maybe it was searching each individual string, then taking the intersection of the sets - either way, I also understand that searching ignores requests of 3 or less characters.

It would seem to me that not searching on those will affect searches for: etc etc. CGI actually pulls up some documentation, so that one is a bit unique - it doesn't do a CGI search, just some docs.

I know nothing about how everything is implemented - but I was wondering if maybe a list of these shorter terms could be compiled and added to valid searches. Obviously, a search on the word 'of' should probably return empty - but things like XML, Tk and the like would be nice if they actually pulled up results - I don't even know how I came across MX Lookups again - I think I got lucky and tried searching some extra terms that did it.

~Brian

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(tye)Re: Searching tweak
by tye (Sage) on Jun 25, 2002 at 00:38 UTC