Correction, some, but not all search features have been restored.In the words of the Lone Ranger, to his noble steed, "Whoa there, Silver. Whoa, big fella! Easy!"
Try a search for GOP, JFK, FEC, etc.
Maybe you don't use FR for reasearch. Many like Alamo-girl do.
I assume that you are referring not to the newly released "Search by/to User/Bump List" function:This forum software is always a work in progress, and things change RAPIDLY around here, but the "three-letter" glitch that you have discovered has been around for a while, and there ARE some existing work-arounds.http://beta.freerepublic.com/focus/site/user-postsbut, instead, to the "Search for Words to be found in article titles" function, i.e.:http://beta.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/search
or
http://beta.freerepublic.com/focus/news/search, etc.
From:
Free Republic Search Engine *Experimental*
Posted on 12/7/01 4:41 PM Pacific by John RobinsonTo: John Robinson
I posted this article "INS Achieves 2-Year Naturalization Program Goals" and did a search for just 'INS' and had no results. I tried the entire title, '2-year', 'Naturalization' and 'Goals' and found the article easily. I then tried FBI, CIA and IRS and had no results.
65 posted on 12/7/01 8:54 PM Pacific by WIMom
To: WIMom
You reminded me of the one horrible limitation of this search engine: it indexes words of a minimum of four characters in length. Not one of those TLA will index. :-(
I will have to document that somewhere.
66 posted on 12/7/01 9:16 PM Pacific by John Robinson
and
To: John Robinson; WIMom
Well, this search engine is a hybrid.I see. So a "work-around" for the "ignore three-letter words" problem is to include in the search SOMETHING ELSE, which is longer than four characters, like:
The workhorse is the FULLTEXT index facility included with recent versions of MySQL, this workhorse ignores three-letter words. If you give the workhorse only three-letter words, it will return nothing.However, if you give the workhorse something it can find, like "song" and "parody" and use "match all" or "match exact", my code will further restrict what the workhorse finds-- it takes the results from the workhorse and then filters them again. So if you are looking for "song", "parody", and "you", the workhorse ignores "you", finds many records with "song" and/or "parody", gives those results to my code, which then makes sure each has "song" AND "parody" AND "you".
And my code is not invoked if you do a "match any"; so "match any" will never find a three-letter word.
This might sound amazingly complicated, but it really isn't that much code. :-)
fbi files - rather than just FBIAlso, FOUR-letter words - by themselves - seem to be O.K.:
irs taxes - rather than just IRS
fox news - rather than just FOX
freep cnn - rather than just CNN
waco
news
gore
Thanks for your possible work arounds. But the "three-letter-glitch" as you put it has not been around for a while, to my experience. It worked fine for me till the makeover. The same is true for the now missing search for aticles by poster and search for freeper posters by partial name.