Fixed: Game entries that have words of 2 letters or less may not show up in a search properly.

mclemore

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Modern databases (modern as in the last several decades in particular) and their performance depend on indexes. In our configuration, these indexes ignore words that are less than 3 characters, and may also drop common words. For these purposes a character counts as a letter, number, underline, or one and only one single quote as long as the quote doesn't begin or end a word. Thus some games may be unsearchable.

Our main encyclopedia engine won't for example, find a search for "Mr. Do." as each word having 2 letters are ignored.
A new version of TAFA (The Arcade Flyer Archive) is launching this week will also use indexes and will have the same issue.

While the database setting could be changed off of the default to handle 2 characters words in indexes, this is a database wide setting, and we can't do it due to impacts it would have on other databases and tables.

What about the existing TAFA you ask? The existing TAFA (ancient) code isn't efficient, and doesn't generally use database indexes. To do a search on the current TAFA takes about 150x to 200x as much time for the database call as the new site (which is obviously a lot more optimized). The difference may not be noticeable to users generally, but is important on both the scalability of the site (ability to handle traffic) as well as its ability to defend against denial of service attacks.

There is a work-around that doesn't hurt the performance and will allow such records to be found.

We will schedule this upgrade, but it might not happen until September.

Some examples (not complete).

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NEEDING FIX - MISSING

Mr. Do (and Mr. Do variants and sequels)
T.A.N.K
T-N-T
T.N.T.
V1
V-81 (vending machine)
VL (jukebox)
W (jukebox)
Wi-Co (this might be a different issue. A search for WiCo will bring it up).
The X
X2, X5, X7, X9 (Jukeboxes)

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NEEDING FIX - IMPERFECT RESULTS

T.K.O. Boxing
T.V. *
U-* (and similar, ignores U- so just searches on boat.
U.S. *
U.S.A. *
UB QB *
Vs. xxxx (vs. series. They show up anyway on search on the second word, but then find other records that aren't applicable).

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IGNORING FOR NOW
V'Ball (works on new site, just not current one)
 
I spent a few hours and was able to implement a fix on the main site 'Search Machines' function. It should be working much better.

The system is pretty flexible. You could search for Mr Do, Mr. Do, Mr-Do, Mr. Do! and still find... well Mr. Do!

Or you could search for A-B-C Bowler, ABC Bowler, or A B C Bowler, and still find our A-B-C Bowler entry (though a search for A-B-C Bowler won't find ABC Bowler, a different game.


If anyone finds any issue with the Search Functions on the main site (or Advanced Search), please let me know. Thank you.
 
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