Site Feedback Major search engine flaw

TheAppleCore

TheAppleCore

Bluelighter
Joined
Jul 14, 2007
Messages
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Because the search engine for this forum has the incredibly convenient feature of completely ignoring all search keywords that are less than four characters long, it is rendered incapable of performing searches on a vast array of chemical names.

For instance, I might want to search the "Trip Reports" subforum for reports on 4-AcO-DMT. I should be able to tell the search engine to look for any thread with "4-aco-dmt" in the title, but because the search engine splits up the term between the dashes, and searches for "4", "aco", and "dmt", it ignores all three keywords and returns no results. Even though, clearly, there are dozens of reports on the compound.

This is a major flaw in a search engine, *especially* on a forum concerned with the discussion of a lot of psychotropic substances with chemical names like 4-AcO-DMT, 2C-E, JWH-018, MXE, DXM, etc.
 
^ Thanks for the advice, but I can't seem to get it to work. :( Searching for lsd* only gives me matches like "LSD25" or "LSDelicious". I can't search for "LSD" as a term on its own.
 
Use google search. It doesn't search just one forum, but it allows you to use three letter words, which is important in a lot of cases.

site:bluelight.ru lsd orange juice
 
Yes, google would be good... Most of the time when I look up a certain drug on google there is usually a thread on this site in the results
 
TheAppleCore said:
Because the search engine for this forum has the incredibly convenient feature of completely ignoring all search keywords that are less than four characters long, it is rendered incapable of performing searches on a vast array of chemical names.

For instance, I might want to search the "Trip Reports" subforum for reports on 4-AcO-DMT. I should be able to tell the search engine to look for any thread with "4-aco-dmt" in the title, but because the search engine splits up the term between the dashes, and searches for "4", "aco", and "dmt", it ignores all three keywords and returns no results. Even though, clearly, there are dozens of reports on the compound.

This is a major flaw in a search engine, *especially* on a forum concerned with the discussion of a lot of psychotropic substances with chemical names like 4-AcO-DMT, 2C-E, JWH-018, MXE, DXM, etc.
Click to expand...
My understanding is that vB is supplied 'out of the box' with it's search engine configured in a way that it is unable to return results for three-letter words.

Changing this usually requires both changes to the vB set-up options (easy enough) but also the my.cnf file on the server, along with rebuilding the search index. While this is achievable (it's been done before, many moons ago), I doubt anyone will get around to doing it. It may also require that a blacklist of three letter words be configured so that it lessened the strain on the server.

I agree that it's a real flaw, given that half the drugs seem to have a three-letter acronym.

Using an asterisk will only only return results where the three-letter acronym is followed by some other character (as has already been demonstrated).

The alternative of using Google is probably the best way of achieving these searches (although don't use the custom search engine at the top of Bluelight's page as it's currently broken). If you are wanting to limit Google's search results to a single forum, I'd suggest putting the Forum's full name into your search string. EG:
Code: 
site:http://www.bluelight.ru/vb lsd "Psychedelic Drugs"
 
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Search for three letter words returns no results

Searching on DMT or LSD returns no results. Any ideas?
 
These search terms are too common perhaps? Maybe more specifics in an advanced search mode would help.
 
Are you searching for something (about those substances) in particular?
 
The BL search is problematic atm, until it's sorted I'd just do a Google search. Just put "site:bluelight.ru" and then your search term, and you'll get results.
 
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