Replies

song parody you - and three letter words - at least "you" - now seem to work, too!
Besides "you", it appears that some small words DO work as secondary search terms:

song parody abc - finds "ABC" in the sub-title of an OLD thread:
Topic: DOUG FROM UPLAND - Song Parodies
SONG PARODY: If You're Happy (well, NBC, ABC, CBS?)
Bringing Entertainment, News and Truth (BENT)
6-99 Lyrics, Doug from Upland
...
...
Posted by: doug from upland
1 06/01/1999 07:38:58 PDT

song parody new - finds a BUNCH of threads with "new" in the title (plus "knew, news", etc.)
song parody all - finds threads with "all" in the title (plus "call, callahan, ball, ballad", etc.)
- and even -
song parody the - finds MANY threads with "the" in the title (plus "they, them, another", etc.)

- but by themselves:
new - finds nothing
all - finds nothing
the - finds nothing

Well, this search engine is a hybrid. The workhorse is the FULLTEXT index facility included with recent versions of MySQL, this workhorse ignores three-letter words. If you give the workhorse only three-letter words, it will return nothing. However, if you give the workhorse something it can find, like "song" and "parody" and use "match all" or "match exact", my code will further restrict what the workhorse finds-- it takes the results from the workhorse and then filters them again. So if you are looking for "song", "parody", and "you", the workhorse ignores "you", finds many records with "song" and/or "parody", gives those results to my code, which then makes sure each has "song" AND "parody" AND "you".

And my code is not invoked if you do a "match any"; so "match any" will never find a three-letter word.

This might sound amazingly complicated, but it really isn't that much code. :-)