Search Options

The search facility is one of the most important tools for locating information in a portal website. The XOOPS search categorises results by module – records are identified as news items, downloads, links or other types as per the modules you have installed.

Global searches of all resources on your site are enabled by default. If you disable global searches this facility will no longer be available and the search block will become non-functional.

The default minimum keyword length for searches is five characters. Any terms that are shorter will be ignored. This is useful for controlling the precision of searches, though not much use for terms like “site map”. Short keywords tend to be more common so they tend to return a greater number of records, many of which may be irrelevant. Longer keywords tend to retrieve fewer records but with a higher degree of precision.

Searching is relatively expensive in computational terms and so excluding short terms will reduce the load on the server. However, bear in mind that sometimes it is useful to be able to search for a short term.