The asterisk does NOT allowing searching for bex

[Pompal 09.]

I've posted this to the Lounge forum, but I'll notify this one as well.

You can't actually do a search on "bex".

Now, you're all saying, "yes you can, just use an asterisk!"

No, it doesn't work. If you search for bex*, what this does is to give you all messages which have words with more than 3 letters in them which have bex as the first 3 letters. For example, bexxie or bexgirl or bexwashere. The word Bex by itself is never found.

If you search for *bex, what this does is give you the messages which have words of more than 3 letters which end in bex. Like cybex or ihatebex or whatever. Again, Bex is never found.

If you want to quickly test this out right now, do a search, searching Titles Only, on bex*. You will get zero results. Whereas, of course, there are many dozens of messages with bex in the title.

This helps to explain why this forum keeps seeing the same questions over and over again, "what's the address of bex, what's the phone number", etc., and people keep asking why they just didn't do a search to find this out. They probably >did< do a search, it just didn't work.

Now, if you do a search, searching the entire posts, for bex*, you will indeed get a bunch of results. This is because there are lots of messages with words that have other letters after bex, like "bex's" or "I went to bex...it was great". So searching on bex* or *bex will give you a small fraction of the messages which contain bex.

You will have the same problem searching for messages which contain words like CIM or GFE, or for sp's with 3 letter names like Amy.

This makes this search engine pretty much useless for anyone interested in finding out about Bex, or about the various sp's who have 3 letter names.

 

[Issy]

Something I've discovered:

The bext way to deal with this messed up search feature regarding 3 letter word searches is to put the asterisk both before >and< after the word.

A search on bex* gives you all those messages which contain bex's and "I went to bex...it was good".

A search on *bex gives you all those messages which contain words like Sarah@bex or amy@bex.

A search on *bex* seems to return both the results of the other 2 searches, it gives you all the bex's >and< all the sarah@bex messages.

Which is still only a small percentage of the bex messages. But at least searching for *bex* gives you 6% of the total messages, instead of only getting the 3% you get from *bex or bex*.