Why Can't You Do A 3 Letter Search?

[2Boys4Me]

Why is the search engine limited to 4 letters or more? It's really getting on my nerves.

In the past few weeks I've needed to search for: egg rolls, Bull's Eye barbecue sauce and recipes for ham and instead of getting results back I have to weed through thousands of posts or abandon my search. Usually I abandon the search.

[Guest j_mommy]

I just tried it and it worked....I did ham and it worked brought up a bunch of links!!!

[Guest j_mommy]

Note: I did it in the example search box...that searches this site through google....alittle more work but atleast you can do the three word searches!

[somegirl2004]

sooo good to know this! i thought i was the only one being annoyed by the lack of three-letter searches! thanks!

[Joni63]

Yes, it was frustrating me too!

[home-based-mom]

Ever heard of In and Out Hamburgers? Try doing a search!

[grantschoep]

I think using the google search is way way simpler and easier to use. Note there are tricks that you can use with most all good search engines. Examples:

Searching for :

"cookie dough"

note the quotes, will find only pages that have those two words in a row.

Searching for :

+windows -microsoft

Means the page MUST include windows, but exclude any page that has microsoft in its name. (note the + and -)

You can combine them all like:

+"gluten free" +chocolate -white

That would give you all pages that had the two words gluten free in a row, the word chocolate, but not pages that talked about white(presumably chocolate)

Just knowing the quote trick and the + and - trick really help in searching. They've really been around since the first big search engines, AltaVista and WebCrawler, of course the two that everybody uses... oh wait.. where are they. Who is this google and yahoo? :> I'm showing my age(not old, not young, but I do remember seeing one of the first times I saw a graphic image on a webpage! It was one of the first pages, unfortunatly, my www browser did not support displaying graphic images, but you could download them. Just think, that was in 1995... 12 years ago... I was on the bleeding edge so to say.

What I thank this site for, is I never new the : trick, to restrict to a specific site. You can do the same "example" search this site shows to restrict to any site you like.

[2Boys4Me]

Thanks Grant. I knew the " " trick, but not the + - trick.

I had always been doing searchs from the search window on this site, because usually I was on the site at the time. I guess now I'll have to open another window and do a separate search from off site.