search bar, ...more than four letters? Options

[*xcaitlinx*]

ugh...what's really been pissing me off is how you have to enter words that are four letters + in the search bar. it's hard when you're trying to search something with "the", "or", "an", and other short, common words. a lot of the time i don't get the same results or any results at all if i just enter one word because i can't put "the" in. i think it'd be better if there was either no word letter minimum, or the minimum should be 2 or 3 letters. four is a little high IMO.

[*mipadi*]

Words like "the", "and", "a", and so forth typically get filtered out of search results, because they would a) return too many unintended hits and b) dramatically increase the score of returns. (I don't know if IPB ranks returns or not, but this is the reason why search engines like Google filter out these words.) These words are commonly unimportant--how many searches actually require "the", "and", and so forth?

There's also the point that words like "and", "or", and "not" cannot be searched for because they are Boolean expressions, meaning you can use them in searches such as "Weezer AND music" to find threads containing "Weezer" and "music," "beans OR squash" to find threads containing "beans" or "squash" (but not necessarily both), and "harry NOT potter" to find threads containing "harry" but not "potter". As such, these words cannot be searched for because they are reserved.

One thing you can do is work around this limitation by making sure certain words are included or excluded, using + or - signs. This will help refine searches.

As for the 4-character minimum, I think this is done to limit how hard a database is hit during a search. Searching a database is a processor-intensive task, especially when tiny little sequences that will commonly appear are searched for.