Do you know that you can't search for 'Z8' or 'M5' on this borad? - The Unofficial BMW M5 Messageboard (m5board.com)

chunpng · 29th January 2002, 05:50

This is incredible.

I tried to locate some pictures of a Z8 to show my wife.

I went to the search function and typed 'z8'. The search result says: must be at least 3 letters.

Same result when I typed 'M5'.

I tried 'z8s', 'z8 pictures' etc. and the results showed 'no match'. Isn't that the irony of ironies that we can's get anything on 'z8' and or 'm5' on this board?

Gustav?

CP

fooz8em · 29th January 2002, 09:07

you just need to add a wildcard in order to get your results back.

so, "M5" would become "M5*", where the star denotes any character, including whitespace.

fwiw, i wouldn't suggest searching solely on "M5"...use some other words or conditionals as well in order to refine your search.

hope this helps.

polvoronn · 29th January 2002, 09:09

if you're looking for any old image, try using Google's image search. It's the best image search on the net IMO.

http://www.google.com

-paolo

chunpng · 29th January 2002, 18:04

Hi Paolo,

I did get the z8 pictures I wanted using Google. I come here as a force of habit, and just found it 'interesting' and ironic to find what I reported above.

CP

Angel · 29th January 2002, 21:52

Hey CP,

I was just cleaning out my message boxes and noticed that I sent you a PM about a month ago. The message tracker said you never read it. Just wondering if you knew about the PM feature, I'm not sure what it was that I sent you because I deleted the message from my out box. Just wanted to let you know.

chunpng · 29th January 2002, 22:58

Hi Harry,

Check your PM.

Thanks.

CP

Russ · 30th January 2002, 00:23

If you try a search for "DSC OFF", the searcher returns with: "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

And a run against "DSC OFF*" returns threads which don't necessarily contain the word "OFF". All the threads do contain "DSC", but that wild second term ("OFF*") causes hits on words such as "office" and "offline" (there's a ton of those! almost 1 per registered member!). The strange thing is that the word "OFF" doesn't really command a hit and never gets high-lighted.

Q. Does the search engine have something against the word "OFF"?

Russ

MEnthusiast · 30th January 2002, 03:13

here you go- although you already got pics- heres some more if you like:
http://homepage.mac.com/menthusiast

cheers

greg · 30th January 2002, 04:53

Q. Does the search engine have something against the word "OFF"?

A. No. the search engine has something against words with 3 or fewer characters.

hey, don't shoot me - I'm just the messenger. That's the way it works. Clearly we've raised several examples pointing out that this isn't always helpful. I believe it is there for a good reason, however - and that is to avoid hosing the server because someone put "the" or "is" or "and" in the search criteria, and every single post would qualify. I guess the search engine isn't smart enough to have an "ignore these words" list.

(Just a guess. Gustav?)

Russ · 30th January 2002, 14:24

Quote:

Originally posted by greg
...the search engine has something against words with 3 or fewer characters... ...I guess the search engine isn't smart enough to have an "ignore these words" list...

Greg, I have sneaking suspicion that there is indeed a "3-letter short word ignore list" stashed away somewhere.

The search engine has no problem highlighting my 3 letter word "DSC", but fails to find any instances of the word "OFF".

A search for "THE*" shows that the search engine will ignore the 3-letter word "THE", but goes ahead and highlight words with 4 or more letters like "THEY", "THEM", and "THEIR". This appears to be WAD (working as designed).

So now, I'm personally curious to see what's on that "3-letter short word ignore list". And, more importantly, if it could be edited to allow some of our more commonly used terms (like "OFF").

Russ

Gustav · 30th January 2002, 15:20

Minimum Word Length
Enter the minimum word length that the search engine is to index. The smaller this number is, the larger your search index, and conversely your database is going to be.

Changed it to two. Let's see if it will be slow...