search system

I have an issue with the search system. You can see the live website at www.padmanstops.com.au

If you search for "bay outlets" it shows search results but yet if you search for "B4" which is a product code included in the title it does not show any results. I have checked a number of the product codes and none of them product a search result.

Any ideas as I need to be able to search by product code.

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Joomla search has a minimum number of characters required.
"B4" is only 2 characters which is too short.
Notice it will not find "bay" either - 3 characters.
It will find "stop" - so 4 characters seems to be the minimum.

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i have already altered the minimum characters to 2 for the joomla search system. If i enable the content search the standard joomla plugin then it will product results for the search system.

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Hmmmm . . . I don't see any minimum characters limitation in the FLEXIcontent Search Plug-in.
So I am not sure where else the limitation could be coming from.

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could this be the cause of the limitation. dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/ ... uning.html

looks like it could be a mysql issue

after looking at it further I have narrowed it down to the mysql variable: ft_min_word_len=4

by default it is set to 4 which is the minimum characters a full text in mysql will do.

As the website is on a shared hosting environment this is going to be a pain to change server wide.

Is there any other thoughts on how I can overcome this?

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Now I know where that limitation comes from.
Never wanted to decrease it so I was not concerned.

I think you should abandon this idea of searching for 2 character strings.
It sounds like it will cause the relevancy ranking to go out the window.

And after looking at your website I do not see the need.
There are not that many products to where detailed search is that important.
Adding a bit more local navigation and perhaps some related items links and I doubt users will not be able to find what they need via browsing.

What confuses me is you said it does find the two character strings in the core Joomla search.
Is that correct?

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yes if I enable the content search plugin it will work but it is using SQL like searches not full text searching like flexicontent plugin.

I could change the search plugin to use the same method as the joomla core plugin to use like searches instead might be the only option at this stage.