change board's search criteria ??

[bluebooger]

wanted to search 
Saylor.org, Straighterline, Study.com, OnlineDegree.com, Sophia.Org Discussion 

specifically this thread 
The official guide to courses by Straighterline, Study, et al: We want YOUR input! 

for info about 
IBM certificates with ACE accreditation offered through coursera.org 
https://www.acenet.edu/National-Guide/Pa...Active%22)
ACE for IBM
 
so I go to Advanced Search 
https://www.degreeforum.net/mybb/search.php 
and for Keyword word search term I type in 
IBM 
hit enter and get 
Online Degrees and CLEP and DSST Exam Prep Discussion
One or more of your search terms were shorter than the minimum length. The minimum search term length is 4 characters.
If you're trying to search for an entire phrase, enclose it within double quotes. For example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".

is there anyway the admin can change this to accept 3 letters ?

you can't even search for WGU because of the limitation 

[allvia]

Or HAU (another common 3 letter search that fails).  I have to go through Google to search this site for anything less than 4 characters (for example: HAU site: degreeforum.net), and that doesn't work well (if at all) to search a specific thread.

[bjcheung77]

Most forums have this restriction, I don't know if there are any workarounds to this yet... Maybe we have to be crafty and use HAU+ or something to make it 4 characters... Interesting, got to see what options there are with MyBB searches...

[bluebooger]

Or HAU (another common 3 letter search that fails).  I have to go through Google to search this site for anything less than 4 characters (for example: HAU site: degreeforum.net), and that doesn't work well (if at all) to search a specific thread.

if I go to google and search for
"IBM" site:degreeforum.net

it give me all posts, on this site which is ok

but if I do it without the quotation marks the results are weird            
the first half of the page seems to be good results but as I scroll down the page of search results it shows some posts about finance and business
I clicked on them and don't see the phrase IBM on them anywhere -- interestingly my post about changing search criteria is on the bottom of that image -- and IBM is highlighted -- so google is getting some things correct

https://imgur.com/a/V3pRCAZ

https://imgur.com/a/V3pRCAZ

[davewill]

I'd guess that Google knows that IBM stands for International Business Machines, and starts broadening the search results to include hits with those terms. The quotes prevent that from happening.

I'm sure that limiting the search terms to 4 characters or greater is done to prevent the keyword search database from mushrooming in size. It's possible that the admins could allow certain common shorter terms to be indexed. If it were possible to allow three letter words in all caps, that would probably work fairly well.

[rachel83az]

Some newer forum softwares allow smaller words, like IBM, WGU, etc. but I'm not sure if MyBB does that at all.

[bjcheung77]

At the time being, I don't recall this board software has an update or option for 3 letter word searches yet... It may be in the works, I haven't checked the MyBB forum for updates though...

[LevelUP]

By default, MySQL's full-text search has a minimum word length of 4 characters.

Considering most shared hosting servers are set to this 4-character limit for MySQL searches, it's unlikely that MyBB will update the software to include 3-letter MySQL searches. Even if they did, it wouldn't matter unless MySQL is configured to support it.

If you have a dedicated host, you can manually configure the MySQL file to allow 3-letter searches, but this comes with the risk of increasing the index size and affecting performance.

Given the performance issues we've encountered in the past, I would say it isn't worth the risk to change to 3-letter searches.