Donna
February 15, 2009, 11:58 AM
We've had several requests to improve the Crochetville search by allowing phrase search and Boolean search. These options weren't possible with the type of search we were using.
vBulletin forums have two types of search available: vBulletin internal search and MySQL full-text search. The choice is one or the other; they can't both be available at the same time on a forum.
Some time ago, we started getting a lot of max connections database errors as a result of searches being performed. Despite troubleshooting with vBulletin support and increasing our php memory limit, the errors would crop up again now and then. After researching the problem, we found that vBulletin's internal search is far too resource-intensive for a large forum, and that switching to MySQL full-text search was the way to go.
Now that we have switched to MySQL full-text search and activated Boolean search, you can:
Search phrases (that is, put quotation marks around a phrase to search for the entire phrase, rather than individual words in the phrase).
Use Boolean search, which uses the logical operators: OR, AND, NOT. See this tutorial to learn more about Boolean searching: http://www.internettutorials.net/boolean.html.
We've also customized our server settings to decrease the minimum word length to three (the MySQL default is four). This means you can search for words with three or more letters.
No type of search is perfect; each has its limitations. One of the limitations of MySQL full-text search is that is has a list of stopwords (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-stopwords.html) that will not be indexed.
And last but not least, we've added a custom Google search! Many of you probably already use Google to search Crochetville. Now we've put it at your fingertips. It's available in the Search drop-down menu in the navigation bar or directly on our google search page: http://www.crochetville.org/forum/googlesearch.php. Please note that because Google can only crawl public pages, members-only forums on Crochetville will not be included in these results.
Regardless of which search is used (vBulletin internal search or MySQL full-text search), it can be a server-intensive process on a large forum. To conserve our server resources, we have now restricted the MySQL full-text search to registered members only. Guests will now have access to only the Crochetville custom Google search which uses Google's servers, not ours.
As we learn more about our new MySQL full-text search, we will be compiling the information and we will create a How-To/FAQ page about searching Crochetville as soon as we are able.
vBulletin forums have two types of search available: vBulletin internal search and MySQL full-text search. The choice is one or the other; they can't both be available at the same time on a forum.
Some time ago, we started getting a lot of max connections database errors as a result of searches being performed. Despite troubleshooting with vBulletin support and increasing our php memory limit, the errors would crop up again now and then. After researching the problem, we found that vBulletin's internal search is far too resource-intensive for a large forum, and that switching to MySQL full-text search was the way to go.
Now that we have switched to MySQL full-text search and activated Boolean search, you can:
Search phrases (that is, put quotation marks around a phrase to search for the entire phrase, rather than individual words in the phrase).
Use Boolean search, which uses the logical operators: OR, AND, NOT. See this tutorial to learn more about Boolean searching: http://www.internettutorials.net/boolean.html.
We've also customized our server settings to decrease the minimum word length to three (the MySQL default is four). This means you can search for words with three or more letters.
No type of search is perfect; each has its limitations. One of the limitations of MySQL full-text search is that is has a list of stopwords (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-stopwords.html) that will not be indexed.
And last but not least, we've added a custom Google search! Many of you probably already use Google to search Crochetville. Now we've put it at your fingertips. It's available in the Search drop-down menu in the navigation bar or directly on our google search page: http://www.crochetville.org/forum/googlesearch.php. Please note that because Google can only crawl public pages, members-only forums on Crochetville will not be included in these results.
Regardless of which search is used (vBulletin internal search or MySQL full-text search), it can be a server-intensive process on a large forum. To conserve our server resources, we have now restricted the MySQL full-text search to registered members only. Guests will now have access to only the Crochetville custom Google search which uses Google's servers, not ours.
As we learn more about our new MySQL full-text search, we will be compiling the information and we will create a How-To/FAQ page about searching Crochetville as soon as we are able.