How do I configure the search engine for words of less than 4 characters?
MySQL’s fulltext search engine has a default set of stop words which it ignores, and a minimum word length set to 4 characters by default. To change this you must reconfigure MySQL, see: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html However, this talks about MySQL generically, and not with regard to using it with MediaWiki. So … if you took all the defaults for your installation of the OS, MySQL and MetaWiki and have only a small database (i.e. just installed), here’s how to go about getting three letter searches: • Firstly, if you already have a big wiki, the change can take a long time. The MySQL reference above has someone who did this for a 4Gb database and it took 10 days! So be careful. Now let’s have a go. • The parameter to reset is inside MySQL, and as noted above is discussed on the MySQL web site. Go there for more details if you’re into MySQL. • Find the config file for My SQL – this is normally my.cnf, located in /etc • Edit my.cnf and add the relevent para
