BIG problem! I can't search chinese words!

lifent

I test the statusnet on my site: lifent.net
I find that: if there is a sentence written in chinese "大家好啊，欢迎加入！"（which means "hello everyone, welcome join in us!"）
I can't got any result by searching a piece of this sentence, like "大家" or "欢迎"，I can only get right result by searching the whole sentence! even the english words as so, like the word "hello", I can find it by input whole "hello", but can't find by "hel" or "llo"!
what's the problem?
I can run a functional search with the wordpress on my site(you can try), but statusnet not support this.

twitman

I have experience similar problems with search. Though my site is not in Chinese. I think search needs a bit more work. I know there is the sphinx plugin but we should not be made dependent on that

lifent

How can I set sphinx up to run ?
I have edit the config and add sphinx, and edit sphinx.conf, set the dbconnection
But the search function seems not change at all?

lifent

tok. i konw on my sharing host the sphinx can't be get ...so the searching function would be a really problem now....

lifent

ok. i konw on my sharing host the sphinx can't be get ...so the searching function would be a really problem now....

evan

By default, we use MySQL full-text search. This is notoriously ungood -- it requires flaky old MyISAM, and it doesn't operate very well. AND, most importantly, it won't allow searches less than 3 characters!

I searched for 欢迎加入 in my dev site, and was able to come up with results. 大家 did not. My guess is that this is a character-limit issue with MySQL full text search.

Fortunately, we have other options. Probably better for most sites, at least to start off, is to use 'LIKE' search:

$config['search']['type'] = 'like';

The downside of this is that it does a table scan, which can really degrade search functionality when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of notices. (This is the kind of search that WordPress does, but who has more than a few hundred blog posts, right?).

Anyways, use the 'like' search as above, and look at Sphinx when you have many more users or notices.

lifent

god. thanks evan ! The sphinx need to be installed, and my host can't accept my installing sphin request, so I'll try "like" search. Thanks again!