Partial string not found. Only full words found in a search. why?

[SupermanInNY]

Hi All,

We've just set up a test board and tried to populate it with few posts.
In one of the posts we put the המגנזיום blah blah..... (the board text is in Hebrew)
When running the search for the word: המגנזיום it finds the posts with no problem.
But, when we tried to search for : מגנזיום (omitting the first char) it doesn't find any results.

Is there any way to search for partial strings?

Thanks,

-Sup.

[Nick]

You can place asterisks around the word to search for partial matches.

For example, If I wanted to search for "cat" including partial matches, I would search for "*cat*".
These would be results:
cat
location

If I wanted to find words where cat is the beginning of the word, I would search for "cat*" and would get:
catch
catering.

I could also do the same to search for words that end in cat by searching for "*cat".
I cannot think of any examples though. lol

[SupermanInNY]

You can place asterisks around the word to search for partial matches.

For example, If I wanted to search for "cat" including partial matches, I would search for "*cat*".
These would be results:
cat
location

If I wanted to find words where cat is the beginning of the word, I would search for "cat*" and would get:
catch
catering.

I could also do the same to search for words that end in cat by searching for "*cat".
I cannot think of any examples though. lol

That is exactly the behavior I was expecting and using.
I even tried with % (SQL's LIKE syntax), but to no avail.

That's why I opened the thread.
I'm confused about why it doesn't work.
This is a support forum and supposed to assist users with finding information. Most of the users are novices and old and would not know the 'tricks' of '%' or '*' .
So,. is it something that I'm missing?

המגשים

I'll run a quick test on this board.

I wrote the word: המגשים I wonder how I will be capturing it here on this board. All I want to find is the מגשים which is a legitimate string, long enough for a search, yet is missing the first char.

-Sup.

EDIT: STILL NOT WORKING - AND EVEN WORSE:

After testing it here, it works fine.
But on my board, it doesn't.
Hence my confusion.

Mysql 4.1.21

It should work.
but it fails.

OK,. here is ANOTHER problem:

The word that I'm searching for is showing up in the TAGS. Is the search also works on the TAGS? Because it doesn't find it even though it is explicitly showing up in the tags - as a full string.

[Nick]

The search feature does not search Tags unless you perform a Tag Search.

Go to:
AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> Search Type (on the left navigation menu)
Tell me what you see or take a screenshot.

[Wayne Luke]

As far as I am aware, vBulletin's wildcards only work at the end of a string. There is no real partial string searching built into the system at this time.

[SupermanInNY]

The search feature does not search Tags unless you perform a Tag Search.

Go to:
AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> Search Type (on the left navigation menu)
Tell me what you see or take a screenshot.

Your forum is currently using the Fulltext search engine.

If you wish to revert to the vBulletin search engine, please continue. You can leave the Fulltext indexes in place if you expect to return to the Fulltext search in the near future. Leaving them in place will cause added load on your system in the interim.
Remove Fulltext Indexes? (yes/no)

[SupermanInNY]

As far as I am aware, vBulletin's wildcards only work at the end of a string. There is no real partial string searching built into the system at this time.

I'm surprised.

This means the entire concept of: "cat"
inside
location
as illustrated earlier by Nick would not work,.
or if we look for the word cation we will not find it.
Is it a feature request? or a mistake?
I'm a bit confused about this.

-Sup.

[Nick]

I'm totally confused now. I had read something the other day that explained the exact same thing I explained to you... but now It has been contradicted. And I can't find the page I'm referring to...

So like I said - I'm confused.

[Wayne Luke]

Is it a feature request? or a mistake?

Most likely a resource issue but also a limitation of the MySQL Fulltext searching capabilities. Please see:

http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?107,113504,113504

If you search for *cat, you will find all posts with the word cat in them but it will not find location.

If you seach for cat*, you will find all posts that contain words starting with cat.

Searching doesn't use MySQL's LIKE terminology. It uses Fulltext's Match functionality. This doesn't use the % wildcard. It uses the * wildcard.

The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.

If a stopword or too-short word is specified with the truncation operator, it will not be stripped from a boolean query. For example, a search for '+word +stopword*' will likely return fewer rows than a search for '+word +stopword' because the former query remains as is and requires stopword* to be present in a document. The latter query is transformed to +word.

You can see how Fulltext Searching works here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html

We currently support the +, -, * and " operands in building search queries within vBulletin. The built-in search works approximately the same except phrase search and natural language searching are not possible.

[SupermanInNY]

Most likely a resource issue but also a limitation of the MySQL Fulltext searching capabilities. Please see:

http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?107,113504,113504

If you search for *cat, you will find all posts with the word cat in them but it will not find location.

If you seach for cat*, you will find all posts that contain words starting with cat.

Searching doesn't use MySQL's LIKE terminology. It uses Fulltext's Match functionality. This doesn't use the % wildcard. It uses the * wildcard.

The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.

If a stopword or too-short word is specified with the truncation operator, it will not be stripped from a boolean query. For example, a search for '+word +stopword*' will likely return fewer rows than a search for '+word +stopword' because the former query remains as is and requires stopword* to be present in a document. The latter query is transformed to +word.

You can see how Fulltext Searching works here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html

We currently support the +, -, * and " operands in building search queries within vBulletin. The built-in search works approximately the same except phrase search and natural language searching are not possible.

OK,. I understand how it work. The explanation is technically good and indeed explain the current behavior.

Now,. as it seems, it is not sufficient for my users and they want to add the ability to YES use the % (LIKE) option.
Can this be added as a feature request?
This could be a very expensive query, so it will be obviously regarded as "use with caution" and with "suggested to use longer than 4 chars" to limit result set.

Can this be added on?
We intend to use the board no so much for interaction, but rather to store a knowledgebase and this is a limitation that prevent drill-downs and searches unless you know exactly what you are looking for, or technical enough to use * + - to narrow or expand the search (and our users are 50-60 year olds and wouldn't have a clue about it).

-Sup.

[Wayne Luke]

I have done some looking and no search engine offers what you want. Not even Google seems to work with it and they are considered the kings of search.

While it may be possible to code what you want, I really doubt that using standard queries based on LIKE will be implemented in the near future. Such queries would literally kill your forums because they will not be able to use any kind of index. However you can visit www.vbulletin.org and post such a request there to see if someone can help code this within certain contexts.