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[Harry]

By design, we have limited the search function to require 20 seconds between searches. Our search system does not accomodate two letter words nor most three letter words. Also, users not logged in are required to enter non-machine readable characters from captcha text. This is done to hold server resources under control by rejecting searches by robots.

Do not overlook the Google search that is provided on the drop-down menu when you click search. Google has indexed our boards as well as the calendars and their results are fairly accurate.

With Google, you can also use a minus -sign before a word so that particular word will be ignored in the search results. A wild card* can also be used with a partial word. In this case, it would find all versions of the word card, cards, carding, cardinal, etc., but if the word sign was in the text, that result would not show.

Experiment for yourself and Google has NO time limit between searches.
Results are typically obtained within a quarter of a second.

-- Harry

[Harry]

I have just installed a newer indexed full text search method. It should be faster and run more efficiently. Unfortunately, it loses the capability of searching three letter words such as these that I had provided for in the past:

oil gas pin rod key IHC mag ek fw ab fj rv FX F-M cyl New Way F&J R&V atf saw air jet for dan tom reo hot mep red RV1 gem cck aj.

If you need to look for these items in a post, you might be better off using the Google site search that appears in the same search drop-down menu. Be sure to click the Smokstak.com button or you will be searching the entire web.

Google is fast - I just put "new way" in the site search and I got about 1,050 results from www.smokstak.com for New Way in (0.18 seconds)

I put International and Harvester in our local index and I got 331 results in 0.13 seconds. Our own search allows you to put "and" between words to make the results have both words in the text. You can also search for international not harvester which will give you posts with the first word, but not the second.

[Harry]

• + A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.
• - A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned.
• (no wild card) By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the rows that contain it are rated higher. This mimics the behavior of MATCH() ... AGAINST() without the IN BOOLEAN MODE modifier.
• > < These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.
• ( ) Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
• ~ A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the row's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.
• * The asterisk serves as the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected.
• " A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (‘"’) characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. The engine then performs a substring search for the phrase in the records that are found, so the match must include non-word characters in the phrase. For example, "test phrase" does not match "test, phrase".

• If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.

• 'apple banana' Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.
• '+apple +juice' Find rows that contain both words.
• '+apple macintosh' Find rows that contain the word “apple”, but rank rows higher if they also contain “macintosh”.
• '+apple -macintosh' Find rows that contain the word “apple” but not “macintosh”.
• '+apple +(>turnover Find rows that contain the words “apple” and “turnover”, or “apple” and “strudel” (in any order), but rank “apple turnover” higher than “apple strudel”.
• 'apple*' Find rows that contain words such as “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, or “applet”.
• '"some words"' Find rows that contain the exact phrase “some words” (for example, rows that contain “some words of wisdom” but not “some noise words”). Note that the ‘"’ characters that surround the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that surround the search string itself.

• Some words are ignored in full-text searches:

• Any word that is too short is ignored. The default minimum length of words that are found by full-text searches is four characters.
• Words in the stopword list are ignored. A stopword is a word such as “the” or “some” that is so common that it is considered to have zero semantic value. There is a built-in stopword list, but it can be overwritten by a user-defined list.