Pprune search problems

[Pontius Navigator]

I have recently found that Pprune Search does not work.

If I use three-letter words it tells me that my search term is too short as I have used a word with less than four letters.


This means that it cannot search for TLAs such as RAF, AAC, RN, FAA nor will it accept three letter words like AIR in Royal Air Force.

In essence this means the search disney work.

[PPRuNe Towers]

Three letter versus 4 letter is the difference between having PPRuNe or not.

Three letter searches put the server into a state of total collapse - which means the forums are unusable. We apply other significant but less obvious throttling to search demands on the server.

Rob

[Pontius Navigator]

Thanks, understood.

[Danny]

As PPRuNe Towers mentions above, the decision was made that searches would be made on words of four or more characters to ease on the server loads. However.... there are some two and three letter words that can be searched. These words or abbreviations are entered manually by yours truly and can be added to. The current list of searchable two and three letter words are:

BA BAe FCA TUI AA UA VMC IMC VFR IFR twr app rwy AOC A/P APU ATC CFI FMC HSI CAA FAA NVG

Please feel free to add your own suggestions below and they will be considered for inclusion into the list.

[Kestrel_909]

How about searching for it through google, such as,
raf site: pprune.org ? No space between the : and first p of pprune, had to edit it or else a smiley shows u.

[si_lud]

Can we have "bmi" as well please?

[Saab Dastard]

si_lud

I believe it has been added to the list of exceptions.

[Pontius Navigator]

Danny, I agree we can use Google (admission of defeat?) but can we have RAF?
And I will pay up, honest.

[si_lud]

Nope...

Just tried it again:

The search term you specified (bmi) is under the minimum word length (4) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.

[Saab Dastard]

si_lud,

There's a thread in admin with a bunch of 3-letter words / initials / abbrevs that Danny said had been added.

For whatever reason, looks like they weren't or were taken out again.

SD

[FirmamentFX]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before (I'm not going to search for it - it's a bit existentialist to do a search for threads on the search function... :rolleyes: ) but why is there a 4 character minimum on searches?

I understand the logic behind a minimum limit (I have run forums in the past - believe me I understand!), but I often want to search for Boeing a/c types (777, 747, 727, etc etc) and not everyone prefixes the names with a "B" to get up to the 4 character limit.

Even if I include another search term ("777 flaps" for example) it still errors out on me...

Cheers!

Martin

[mrsurrey]

http://www.clicksmilies.com/s1106/party/party-smiley-013.gif

Congratumelations:

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=276799

[FirmamentFX]

Fair point :rolleyes:

Seems a pity but, as ever, the limits of technology apply everywhere :E

M

[FirmamentFX]

As I managed to start an almost identical thread myself :rolleyes:, I thought I would post on this one instead :)

Could I request the Boeings? Specifically 777 but I guess others would find the other ones useful as well :p

Also "FBW"

Cheers,

Martin

[si_lud]

I just tried a couple of the 2/3 letter acronyms in the list that was given above: none of these appear to work either. It appears that the search is either ignoring the exceptions or else processing the rules in the wrong order...

Hope you can fix this!

[BOAC]

The site is in a constant state of flux - functions come in, go out and come in again. Mods have the same experience with some of our bits. The best way to ask these questions is by the 'contact us' link and then you go straight to the top of the monkey puzzle tree:).

[Danny]

Apologies for the delay in implementing the additional two and three letter exceptions to the search index. I thought they were being added but it is not quite as simple as that.

Currently PPRuNe uses a default 'full text search' from MySql which uses a limit of 4 characters for searches. This can be changed by rebuilding MySql to allow 3, but will increase its work load by quite a bit. Not good. :=

The other way to solve this is to change the search type. This is done through settings. Doing this will cause the search engine to use the 'good word'/'bad word' lists. However, before we do this, we will need to rebuild the search index but it will take FOREVER due to the large number of posts in the database. We would have to turn off the forums and then hope nothing goes wrong while the search index is being built (Up to a couple of hours). :ouch:

Once we have finished researching ways to solve this problem we'll implement what is best for PPRuNe and let you know. Sorry for the delays.

[si_lud]

Thanks for the response Danny.

I have a bit of experience with MySQL/PHP, and have a suggestion for you: you could rebuild MySQL to accept 2/3 letter searches, and then programmatically check the search input using PHP. That way, if it is not in the list of exceptions, and is less than four characters, it would not get submitted to the MySQL database search function.

Hope that makes sense. PM me if you need clarification.

Si

[FirmamentFX]

Thanks for the info Danny! :)

[DaveO'Leary]

Correct me if i'm wrong..But has anyone tried using 'wild card' characters ***
Just a thought. To lazy to try myself.

[CDT Fu]

Hey what about the word: 'air'! Seems a lot of aviation related phrases contain the word air....