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Search Does not Work!

jabermjaberm
edited June 2011 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
Hi All,

I have installed a fresh version of vanilla to experience with. I have posted a number of test topics with words like (test, testing, etc).

Now when I search the forum for some of those words using the search area in the header, I get zero results. Although I am certain those words exist in the title and body of multiple posts.

Why is that?

Regards.
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Best Answer

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    lucluc ✭✭
    Answer ✓
    v2 uses Full Text Search to search the mysql database, those "shortcomings" are from the underlying system used.

    Site with not much content is not proper for search by this.

    Source:
    According to the MySQL manual, Full-text is a “natural language search”; it indexes words that appear to represent the row, using the columns you specified. As an example, if all your rows contain “MySQL” then “MySQL” won’t match much. It’s not terribly unique, and it would return too many results. However, if “MySQL” were present in only 5% of the rows, it would return those rows because it doesn’t appear too often to be known as a keyword that’s very common. (If you have “MySQL” in none of your rows, it’ll return nothing; duh.)

    MySQL also does something pretty useful. It creates a score. This score is usually something like .9823475 or .124874, but always larger than zero. It can range up above 1, and I have seen it at 4 sometimes. (Don’t try to multiply it by 100 and portray it as a % value; people will wonder why their keyword matches an article 431%!)

Answers

  • Options
    lucluc ✭✭
    It's the way Full Text Search from mysql works.
  • Options
    jabermjaberm
    It's the way Full Text Search from mysql works.
    I didn't understand. Please explain further.
  • Options
    lucluc ✭✭
    Answer ✓
    v2 uses Full Text Search to search the mysql database, those "shortcomings" are from the underlying system used.

    Site with not much content is not proper for search by this.

    Source:
    According to the MySQL manual, Full-text is a “natural language search”; it indexes words that appear to represent the row, using the columns you specified. As an example, if all your rows contain “MySQL” then “MySQL” won’t match much. It’s not terribly unique, and it would return too many results. However, if “MySQL” were present in only 5% of the rows, it would return those rows because it doesn’t appear too often to be known as a keyword that’s very common. (If you have “MySQL” in none of your rows, it’ll return nothing; duh.)

    MySQL also does something pretty useful. It creates a score. This score is usually something like .9823475 or .124874, but always larger than zero. It can range up above 1, and I have seen it at 4 sometimes. (Don’t try to multiply it by 100 and portray it as a % value; people will wonder why their keyword matches an article 431%!)
  • Options
    boyzforumboyzforum New
    This is happening to me too. I don't think it's a problem with too little content since I have imported a huge existing forum from phpbb. So I'm not sure it's "because of the way mysql works".
    Do you think my index could be defective for some reason?
  • Options
    TimTim Operations Vanilla Staff
    This is happening to me too. I don't think it's a problem with too little content since I have imported a huge existing forum from phpbb. So I'm not sure it's "because of the way mysql works".
    Do you think my index could be defective for some reason?
    I'll get it working for you.

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • Options
    TimTim Operations Vanilla Staff
    Should be fixed now, @boyzforum - let me know if you notice an improvement ;)

    Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]

  • Options
    boyzforumboyzforum New
    Will do. Thanks
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