Can we change to search engine to allow small words?

**ShrimpBurrito** · 07-07-2009, 09:38 AM

Can we change to search engine to allow small words? I'm not sure what good disallowing small words does, but there are alot of really nice words that are small.....rot, gas, cap, ac, a/c, dc, btu, bed, tow, eat, air, psi, etc., that would be useful to search, but cannot. I've done several searches that have 20 pages of results, but had I been able to search a smaller word, it would have cut down the results to just a few pages. Is it possible/easy to do?

Dave

**rtcassel** · 07-07-2009, 09:50 AM

Google's Advanced Search allows you to use small words and search on a specific site such as trailmanorowners.com. I do not know how complete the search is, but it is something else to try.

**Bill** · 07-07-2009, 10:24 AM

Only Chris knows for sure, but I'm betting it can't be done. I have trouble with Boolean searches on the board as well. For anything beyond an easy search, Tim has the right answer. Go to www.google.com, click on Advanced Search, put in the words or phrases that you want to search for, enter "trailmanorowners.com" in the Site or Domain box, and hit the button. This is a much better search engine.

There is a slightly different way to use Google if you want to search for a post by a particular person. Go to www.groups.google.com. Warning - TMO is not a "group", so don't fill in any of the blanks that ask about groups. But fill in the words/phrases that you want to search for, fill in trailmanorowners.com as the Site or Domain, and way down at the bottom fill in the author's name.

Bill

mcgyver210 · 07-07-2009, 10:26 AM

If this board is anything like mine are the admin can set the minimum characters needed for a search. I have mine on my boards set at 3 I think

**Chris** · 07-18-2009, 10:01 PM

Please try it now, and let me know if you like it better. I can look into a google search system as well if this doesn't work well.
Ct..

**ShrimpBurrito** · 07-18-2009, 10:23 PM

I just tried it. The search engine still searches the longer words just as it always has. When I searched a few shorter words in separate searches: ac, dc, tm -- I didn't receive an error as before, but I did receive a "Sorry, no matches" response. So for some reason, it's not returning results from shorter words.

Thanks for checking into this!

Dave