Mailing List Archive

Yes, 3 characters is the minimum. Apparently that can be changed but
it requires changing something about the database, so I didn't bother
when I learned that.

On Oct 2, 2004, at 7:07 AM, Steffen Siebert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have pages which contains "Ant" and "CVS" in header and normal text.
> But if I search for "ant", "Ant", "ANT", "cvs" or "CVS" I get no
> matches.
>
> I added "Ants" to the page text and a search for "ants" is successfull.
>
> Is there a minimum length for search terms and if so why I don't get a
> message informing me about that fact?
>
> A search for "cvs" in Wikipedia is successfull by the way...
>
> Ciao,
> Steffen
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-l mailing list
> MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
>
Dan E. Kelley, Associate Professor phone:(902)494-1694
Oceanography Department, Dalhousie University fax:(902)494-2885
Halifax, Nova Scotia mailto:Dan.Kelley@Dal.CA
Canada B3H 4J1 http://www.phys.ocean.dal.ca/~kelley/Kelley_Dan.html

Hi,

Dan Kelley wrote:
> Yes, 3 characters is the minimum. Apparently that can be changed but

I've read that, too. But in fact, 4 characters seems to be the minimum,
at least up to version 1.3.3.

Markus

> it requires changing something about the database, so I didn't bother
> when I learned that.
>
> On Oct 2, 2004, at 7:07 AM, Steffen Siebert wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have pages which contains "Ant" and "CVS" in header and normal text.
>> But if I search for "ant", "Ant", "ANT", "cvs" or "CVS" I get no
>> matches.
>>
>> I added "Ants" to the page text and a search for "ants" is successfull.
>>
>> Is there a minimum length for search terms and if so why I don't get a
>> message informing me about that fact?

On Oct 2, 2004, at 12:04 PM, Dan Kelley wrote:
> Yes, 3 characters is the minimum. Apparently that can be changed but
> it requires changing something about the database, so I didn't bother
> when I learned that.

See:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Fine-tuning.html

If running on MySQL 3.x you'll also need to tell MediaWiki that you've
changed the minimum word length by setting $wgDBminWordLen in your
LocalSettings.php.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Change your 'my.cnf' file to contain at least the following:

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=2

[myisamchk]
ft_min_word_len=2

and then even 2-character wordss should be searchable. Once you change
this parameter, you need to rebuild the text index by running
maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php

cheers,
-Nick

Steffen Siebert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have pages which contains "Ant" and "CVS" in header and normal text.
> But if I search for "ant", "Ant", "ANT", "cvs" or "CVS" I get no matches.
>
> I added "Ants" to the page text and a search for "ants" is successfull.
>
> Is there a minimum length for search terms and if so why I don't get a
> message informing me about that fact?
>
> A search for "cvs" in Wikipedia is successfull by the way...
>
> Ciao,
> Steffen
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-l mailing list
> MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l