StuartR wrote: ↑08 May 2022, 08:05
The search does not look in every article, it looks in a presorted index that links to the articles. This index does not have any two letter words in it, so you can't search for them.
Thank you, Stuart.
I see.
So we are never searching the Forums as much as searching a function "f" of the forums, hence Index:=f(Forums).
A corollary then is that if Admin decide to increase the limit from two to twenty-two, then we are doomed to rarely have a satisfied Search - whether it be advanced or simple.
If I am on track so far, I can see why a search for my two-digit string "91" must fail.
The searches, below, all fail with the warning message
which, since we are searching the index, suggests that
the program code that builds the index is stripping out asterisks, and single- and double quotes as a matter of course.
This leads me to the corollary's corollary that the wild-card character must be useless when used with two-character search-strings, be they digits or alphanumeric in general.
An advanced search for gr* fails ("too common"), but an advanced search for gre* finds 12,781 matches.
I suppose that I should be glad that my parents didn't name me
H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N
Cheers, Chris