Unusual search error

[Chris The Great]

I tried searching for HMX and RDX, neither turned up any results. It just said "no results found". I was also able to research immediatly afterwards without the usual delay.

A search for octogen turned up numerous threads, with many instances of HMX and RDX being used.

And unusual error, not annoying since I still found what I was looking for, but very very strange.


Other errors that give no results but I found by searching for different terms when I was curious as to what was going on:
C4, C-4, AP

It almost seems deliberate to me, like the board software writers don't want people to be able to search for certain things.
It certainly throws a chink into the "utfse" replies, since the search engine might NOT answer their question.

[FUTI]

I think I read sometimes ago that Mega or was it NBK said that search engine gives answer only to above three letter searches. Otherwise you could try typing something stupid like "the" or "and"...and get a shi*load of hits that mean nothing just waste server time (at least I figured it out thats what they are talking about). I never tried it but if someone type "AN*" in effort to search for AN based mixtures...will search engine reject it also? If anyone heard about C4 in movies and want to make a couple sacks for home purposes only - it would be unwise to give them such opportunity. If you aren't amateur in the field - you will know where and how to look/ask (like you did Chris).

[Jacks Complete]

Absolutely right, FUTI. Searches for things shorter than four letters don't work, by design. It just doesn't run it.

Another curious effect of the search system is that a search that returns too many results fails in the same way. Searching for "then" returns no results because it is simply too common.

[nbk2000]

The UBB search engine doesn't index words under 4 letters in length, since that would put way too much strain on the server.

Now, it is possible to customize the search engine to index specific exceptions, like TNT or HMX, but that's something Mega would have to do manually and well...

Try using Google, using a site specific search.

[megalomania]

If anyone is willing to compile a list of commonly referenced two and three letter words or acronyms of interest to the Forum I can include these in the search index. The fewer the number of searched words, the larger the search database gets, and the longer it takes. There is an exponential leap in the amount of processing resources going from 4 to 3 to 2 letter matches. Leap... leap... that matches ap (acetone peroxide), le (low explosive), lea (law enforcement association), and that's just one word as well as being completly irrelevant to those terms

I too find it frustrating on some boards that don't let you search under 5 letters. I tried to make the limits as small as feasably possible. As I said, anyone wants to include certain terms I will customize the search database.

[FUTI]

As an ;) example if you try searching for ammonium nitrate or AN, you might get a telephone book thick range of hits that have minor amount of info of use for you. I think that our search engine don't discriminate caps and small letters so I would allow use of those short searchwords only if they are written with all caps.

[Jacks Complete]

I'd suggest a limitation for those words of being whole words only, but that's probably beyond the power of the search routine, without modification.