Search query ignored? "Too common words"

[HeroLinik]

Greetings, y'all.

I have a minor gripe here about the search function. It's not just this forum that's affected, but it's pretty much every forum that runs phpBB that has this issue. In some cases, when I try to search up for something to avoid making a new topic about it, the query sometimes gets through, but in other cases it pretty much nearly always goes ignored for the following reason:

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: <query>.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

This is, I presume, one of the reasons, and if it is I'm guessing it's a major reason, why duplicate threads get created on the same topics over and over. No-one likes to sift through several pages of thread just to find that their question has been answered already because the search refused to find any matching results. Even trying to use advanced search usually yields the same result as well, even if you cut it down just to topic titles only.

Is there a way to bypass this and search for whatever you want?

[bossedit8]

Someone had the same issue way back then in the past which is right here!


You can bypass it by searching another word rather than using the same ones aka think of a different word that can show up messages that you need or something relative to that. In generality about the search function, even for over 2000 words already used I can still apparently search it so there's that.

[HeroLinik]

Someone had the same issue way back then in the past which is right here!


You can bypass it by searching another word rather than using the same ones aka think of a different word that can show up messages that you need or something relative to that. In generality about the search function, even for over 2000 words already used I can still apparently search it so there's that.

But most of the time the same words are reused over and over for topic titles and it's not easy to think of alternatives for it.

[Valentine]

I'm pretty sure this is a basic feature of prophpbb and that it is really difficult to remove it.

[XerX]

Is there a way to bypass this and search for whatever you want?

Short Answer : As a user, no.

Long Answer : The common word filter is designed to filter out words that do not add any value, such as "the", "it", etc. If you find the filter is filtering out terms that it should not, one could argue your threshold value is too low. The threshold is based on word percentage in posts. If the word is used in more than 50% of the topics, it's added to the threshold. This is configurable by the admin however. (afaik)

[Mivixion]

Instead of using phpBB's default search function, use Google and start the search with "http://smbxgame.com/forums: (your search term)"
If that doesn't work, exclude the http:// protocol.

[Emral]

From my experience, the search for topic titles only accepts more words than searching for posts.

[Kevsoft]

Instead of using phpBB's default search function, use Google and start the search with "http://smbxgame.com/forums: (your search term)"
If that doesn't work, exclude the http:// protocol.

To really force google to only search a specific website you have to use the site: prefix.
i.e.:
site:http://www.smbxgame.com/forums Recolored SMB3 Graphics

[Mivixion]

^this is what I was talking about. Thanks! I haven't used that in a while lol