[ginahoy]

I just registered for the VB4 demo. Unfortunately the search engine in the demo appears to be broken. I couldn't get any search to work, so I'm guessing the index must be empty. I rebuilt the index and search engine appears to now be working.

The sample post set up in the demo includes the following phrase: "administrative facilities available"

First, I searched for those three words without quotes. The search engine correctly returns the post. If I add a nonsense word to the search, it still returns the post. This confirms the search engine works as the logical OR -- i.e, it returns posts that contain any of the search words. Apparently there's no option to search for all words.

Now if I add quotes, it returns an error:

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search:
"administrative facilities available"

What's happening here is that the word length checking routine evaluates the quoted string as a single word (including the quotes themselves, as it turns out). From the Admin Control Panel I increased the max word length to 40. Now, when I search for that same string, it correctly returns the post.

However, if I remove the middle word like this: "administrative available", it returns returns the post, confirming that the VB4 search engine is still searching for individual words within the quotes in any order (e.g., no exact phrase search capability). Darn. I also confirmed that even with quotes, it process the search as an OR function.

I saw one strangeness I can't explain. The sample post includes the phrase "24 hours after", but if I omit the middle word and search for "24 after" in quotes, it returns no match. (the min. word length is set to 4, and remember, the word length checker evaluates this as a 10-character word). Although this might suggest the quotes are being processed as an exact phrase search, I was unable to replicate that with any other 3 word string from the sample post. Strange indeed.