how to question: smaller word preference over larger word

[chorton]

Hi,

How would I make it so that the search will seach for smaller words over larger words. I'm not sure how else to word this, so here is an example:

Valid word: GRE (actually an acronym, but still valid)
Valid word: greeting, or great, or degree

What is currently happening is that when a user enters keyword GRE, the user is getting search results with all of the valid words above. But, the user wants to have the shorter word GRE come up as an exact match before the partial match results do.

I can't figure out how to get it so it will find GRE as a word before the partial matches.

Does that make sense?

[wrensoft]

This is the problem with doing automatic wild card searches. All matches are considered equally important. We don't recommend using automatic wild card searches except for Asian languages, where there are often no word breaks.

Favouring all short words over long words is not really a good solution. While it might work in this specific case it would be detrimental in other cases.

So the easy solution is to turn off the automatic wildcard searches and then a search for GRE will only find GRE and not degree. The user can still do an explicit wild card search if required. e.g. *gre*

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David

[chorton]

Hi,

Thanks for the informatin. How can I turn off the explicit wildcard searching? I cannot find this option.

Thanks!

[Ray]

The option can be found in the "Languages" tab of the Configuration window. Uncheck the "Substring match for all searches" option to disable this.

As David pointed out, this option is only really useful for searching certain languages (eg. asian languages), and that is why the option is found in the Languages part of the configuration window.

The default setting has this option disabled so perhaps at some point, you have gone around and flicked it on without realizing what it did.