The "common word" rule is making searching difficult

[Nate U]

Good morning admin and tech support,

Is there any kind of easy-enough tweak to the settings to be done to allow more "common" words to be considered not common?

For example, apparently the word "Bear" is too common to be searched for, which seems unnecessary and makes a search for anything Bear Canyon-related rather tricky.

Hopefully its an easy setting tweak of some kind? If there is a work-around of some kind, I'm down for that too. FYI writing "Bear Canyon" with the quotes results in the same problem.

[dima]

The search thing we're using right now is very simplistic, and treats each word separately: no phrases are supported, which makes it a pain. There are other search backends that maybe would work better, but I haven't gotten around to trying them. In the meantime, google et al work ok, since they have (in theory) read the whole site. Add "site:eispiraten.com" to any search, and it will limit itself to this site. For instance: the search for "bear canyon". This is unideal, since I don't trust the outside sites to really have read everything. Let me try the other backends. I won't get to that in the very near future, and you should definitely bug me about it.

[dima]

I swapped out the search backend, and this should probably not suck now. I THINK searching for phrases works, if you put them in quotes. Please try it.

[Sean]

I think it worked. I did an unfiltered search for "san gabriel" and got 2417 matches.

Screenshot_20250909-064124.Chrome.png

[dima]

Yeah, I've been using it, and it works much better now. This isn't turned on by default because it requires extra work from the person running the server, but it really is a superior situation

[Nate U]

Dima, as ever, you are a gentleman and a scholar.