Improvement on the search function

[Daealis]

It occurred to me when I was trying to find older topics concerning morals. I'm sure there is a whole thread for the "you can't be moral without god!", but since the title can be anything from cheese to saturn, I tried to do a search with:
1)Moral
2)Morals
3)Morality
Every time getting the error message of using a too common word and not getting a result.

So I limited the search:
1)Only Topics
2)Topics in Religion & Irreligion
3)Topics in Religion & Irreligion from the last 2 months
And still getting the same result of being too popular of a word.

And this is the suggestion: Since I'm pretty sure this search wouldn't return half of the forum, why not remove the block of common words? I realise some sort of a limit must be in place to prevent the site functioning alltogether when someone searches for "is" and finds the whole forum, but if it's possible to limit the search otherwise? Like for instance so that a search only returns the first 50 results within the search parameters and then stops the whole search-process.

Seems silly to block some common words just because they're common, when some less common words with more loose parameters can return a plethora of results as well.

 

[CosmicSpork]

This is to help server load. Doing a full text search is quite expensive on resources.

I can adjust the percentage to which is considered a common word but it means re-creating the indexes which can take several hours depends on the number of posts.

Also, just rebuilding the indexes appears to increase the load so much that the board shuts itself down.

 

[FaithlessThinker]

I back this. I find it annoying that sometimes I search for topics that are specifically relevant to the things I have in mind, and I end up getting some of my keywords marked as "too common" and hence ignored by the search feature. This actually causes more harm than good because I get far more general topics and I'm unable to narrow them down because of the ignored "common" keywords.

If you look at Google, they used to filter common words last time, but now even "the" is not ignored by it. I think it's very important to let all words be searched because ignoring common words can prevent us from or make it harder for us in finding the most relevant topic.

 

[CosmicSpork]

Allowing every word to be indexed would be a huge mistake. The server doesn't have the resources to do a full text search on every word ever posted. Google may well do something clever and allow you to search on any word but they have almost infinite resources at their disposal.

I'm not willing to take the entire server down for several hours while it re-indexes every post in the forum right now.