Search Minimum Words Limitation and Other Optimization Methods

[Xiris]

After looking for some time both on vBulletin.org, and on other websites, I've been unsuccessful in finding any information on this subject.

Has anyone been able to mod their vBulletin search to require the user's search contain more than one word? Owning a big board, and unwilling to install Sphynx, I'm currently looking for some alternative methods to help alleviate the load thrust upon our server with searches. I'm hoping that by forcing users to search for more than one word, we can drastically reduce the number of rows the search has to look through. Another idea I had was to limit the time a search query can take. If the search query were to take longer than the allotted time the query would be killed. The last thought that came to my mind was something I've actually seen done on other forums (though, I can't remember if they were vBulletin forums). These forums were actually having their search estimate how many results it would return, and if it were more than x results, the search would not execute.

I'm interested in trying all three ideas should they be possible and practical. Has anyone successfully done any of these things, or could you point me in the right direction toward someone who has?

Thanks!
- Xiris