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Is exact search possible?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 7:27 pm
by ayman1
It appears that phpBB does not understand exact matches in search. I entered "the big three" in the search box, including the quotes, a string I know is repeated five times in my forum, but I got an error message saying that the search items "the", "big" and "three" are too common. It completely ignored the fact that I added quotation marks to look for that particular string.

Is there a way around that? It's very inconvenient.

BTW, how do I edit the list of words phpBB considers too common to look for?

TIA,
AA

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 10:33 pm
by PlanetStyles.net
Have you checked:
Admin Panel -> Search Settings -> Common Word Threshold?

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 5:29 pm
by ayman1
Christian 2.0 wrote:Have you checked:
Admin Panel -> Search Settings -> Common Word Threshold?
Thanks for the tip, but the problem is not the common words, it's that including them in an exact search is ignored. In other words if I look for
the big one
I expect the search to tell me these words are too common, but if I enter
"the big one"
I want the search to look for that particular string in full as is. That's my question. Is there a way to force an exact search?

AA

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 5:41 pm
by Brf
phpBB indexes words, not phrases. If you want to search for a phrase, Google works pretty well.

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 6:17 am
by ayman1
Brf wrote:phpBB indexes words, not phrases. If you want to search for a phrase, Google works pretty well.
Google did miserably, unfortunately. I guess I'll have to insert unique keywords in posts to serve as labels. This will help a bit. Exact text search would be better.

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 12:06 pm
by Brf
ayman1 wrote: Google did miserably, unfortunately.
Really? It works great here:
Big3.jpg
Big3.jpg (44.67 KiB) Viewed 3463 times

As you can see, this topic is right at the top.

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2010 6:10 am
by ayman1
Brf wrote:
ayman1 wrote: Google did miserably, unfortunately.
Really? It works great here:
...
As you can see, this topic is right at the top.
LOL! How helpful is that?

But I did find other pages which also complain that exact search is so limited in phpBB. I'll just make sure I add "pseudo labels" to my posts, so I can find them later.

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2010 12:12 pm
by Brf
ayman1 wrote: LOL! How helpful is that?
It is proof that Google can be used to search for phrases on phpBB boards. If you "failed miserably", then you are doing something wrong.

Re: Is exact search possible?

Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2010 6:40 pm
by ayman1
Is the word indexing done by phpBB or by MySQL?

If it is done by phpBB, then perhaps I can change the definition of word delimiters. For instance, in the phrase "Deuteronomy 18:17" I'd like that to be parsed into two words, "Deuteronomy" and "18:17", but currently it's indexed as three words, "Deuteronomy", "18" and "17", and the last two are considered too common to look for.

I don't want to eliminate the colon from being a delimiter. I want it to be a delimiter only if it is followed by white space or EOL.

TIA,
AA