Secrets of Searching...

mclemore

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Sometimes someone does a search for a word on the main site, or in the forums, and it comes back with no searches, even if it is a very common word (like 'despite', 'new', or 'accordingly'). Common words are specifically excluded from many indexes used by the forums in particular but also by some aspects of the main site.

What makes it on the list?

1) Any word that would appear in 50% or more of searches (ie: things that are part of the forum templates like 'Search'.)

2) Anything that appears in the default list of excluded words by the database. In particular, items on this list:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/fulltext-stopwords.html

We are making some minor changes on the main site to make it pick up some excluded words like 'new' when searching for a game. The forums however, are expected to remain unchanged.
 
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