Replies

I have discovered a way to search Free Republic for any word that is 3 letters or less. As you may or may not know, the FR search function doesn't work on words that are less than 4 letters.
There is ANOTHER way - which can find virtually ALL threads on FR - using FR's internal search engine, and adding a SECOND 4+ letter word as a qualifier.

See, from:

Free Republic Search Engine *Experimental*
Search Free Republic ^

Posted on 12/07/2001 3:41 PM PST by John Robinson
I've placed online an experimental search engine. It currently only searches article titles. If the technology proves worthy, I'll try to expand it to search articles and commentary. If it cooks the server, it's outta here.
It has a few interesting features, please give it a whirl...
-- snip --
To: John Robinson; WIMom

Well, this search engine is a hybrid.
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. :-) [John Robinson]
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:
fbi files - rather than just FBI
irs taxes - rather than just IRS
fox news - rather than just FOX
freep cnn - rather than just CNN

Also, FOUR-letter words - by themselves - seem to be O.K.:
waco
news
gore

108 posted on 12/08/2001 2:36 PM PST by RonDog

The links do not work any more, but the strategy is still valid, IMHO...