Search is basically useless

[dlh]

http://forums3.armagetronad.net/search. ... s=fortress

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: fortress.

Are you serious, phpBB? … Whatever, at least google works well enough.

[kyle]

ya it is pretty useless, been that way for a while. I usually remember close to what someone said, so since phpbb3 I was not able to search very well.

[sinewav]

I started using the Google site:search the day we upgraded. Basically useless, agreed.

[Tank Program]

I had no idea it was that bad. Doesn't look like anyone has written any plug-ins to improve the situation either.

[compguygene]

A few other phpbb3 based forums that I go to have disabled the search feature for this reason.

[Phytotron]

Oddly, I had a portion of a dream last night that Google's site search was discontinued.

[sinewav]

Someone should write a goggle site:search plugin for phpbb3.

[Phytotron]

Still, you can't do some of the more specific searching with Google's site search, can you? Like, specifying the author, subforum, and all that other jazz on the forum's search page. I do use those when searching.

[kyle]

Nope, I use that a lot also.

[dlh]

So I researched this a little: phpbb3 provides two different modules for searching—fulltext_native and fulltext_mysql.

Fulltext_native is the default, and it implements the ridiculous “common word” filter. There is an option to change the threshold for when to consider a word common. However, you'll need to rebuild the entire search index for changes to take effect. Even then, unless you set the threshold to 0 it will still be broken.

Fulltext_mysql uses MySQL's FULLTEXT support, and will also require a new index to be built. FULLTEXT support is only available when using the MyISAM storage engine. I have no idea if the forum here uses MyISAM or InnoDB.