Forum search forcefully "ignores" acronyms

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GreenIsBest
Level 1
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Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2021 11:54 am

Forum search forcefully "ignores" acronyms

Post by GreenIsBest »

Linux Mint forums contains a wealth of advice, troubleshooting and “experience reports” from other users about software, hardware compatibility, and general tips and tricks to get the most out of your Mint.
For newbies especially, this makes Mint forums a blissfull goldmine of help and information.

Following the common advice of “search before you post”, I have continuously run into a major annoyance; the forums search engine has a tendency to ignore search terms at whim. These tend to be small words/terms, and in my experience, happen most with technical acronyms.
According to the forum search itself, anything smaller than 4 letters will be ignored.

My main grudge is, there is a awfull lot of things in IT and Linux wich happen to be 3 letter acronyms; and the forum search forcefully ignores those whenever I try to search for posts related to them. I’ve even tried using quotes (“PGP” instead of PGP), but the forum search ignores them anyway.

This essentially makes it very hard, if not impossible, to search for posts/help/advice related to any subject related to such acronyms or small words.
“PGP”, “CD”, “SSD”, “USB”, “TOR”, “PHP”, “DOS”, “GNU”, “DVD”, “TPM”, “ISO”, “HDD”, “RAM”, “TAR”, “ZIP”, “SSL”… just to name a few.
Not even the use of advanced search options allow for these terms to be searched for (ex: using + or * on words).

Replacing the acronym with its full meaning isn’t a good workaround neither, as it often returns less than ideal results (ex: searching “Solid State Drive” instead of SSD will return all results with “solid” or “state” or “drive”), and only returns them if someone wrote the post using the full meaning rather than the acronym; wich isn’t common given the convenience of acronyms provide.

I’m sure there was a good and logical reason for this to be implemented as it is, but it makes it so much harder to find posts containing/about any such specific terms.
Am’I the only one who gets annoyed by this search “auto-ignore” filtering?
Is there a way to force the forums search to not ignore 3 letter acronyms?
RIH
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Joined: Sat Aug 22, 2015 3:47 am

Re: Forum search forcefully "ignores" acronyms

Post by RIH »

The search function on Forums using phpBB is pretty woeful.
Unfortunately there is not much users can do about it... except use a search engine instead.
If you wish to search for a 3 letter word in this forum (say ZFS) you can do....
ZFS site:forums.linuxmint.com
and you will get a good result..
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Cosmo.
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Re: Forum search forcefully "ignores" acronyms

Post by Cosmo. »

What RIH suggested can be done even more easily. If you use Firefox install the extension "Search Site WE" and you do not need to enter the site:xxx construct. This extension does not only help for this Forum, but for any website.
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