Okay, so the other day I tried to search 'GoWear Fit'... I get a message telling me I'm not using enough words. Then I try 'Go Wear Fit Armband', then I get a message telling me I have to wait 60 seconds. I give up and switch to a different forum.

Today I tried searching 'Smart for Life Cookie Diet' and it tells me again I have too few words. That I need four words! Ummm isn't there 5 there??

Why can't I search just three words? If I want to find all posts with 'GoWear Fit' why can't I? Or 'Cookie Diet'... what am I doing wrong?

Yup, the search feature on this message board is a nightmare to use, and is the worst search engine I have seen on any message board or site. I find that using Boolean search terms (AND, OR, "", NOT, +, -) with Google or Clusty works well. As well, I prefer Clusty over Google as it breaks the results down into categories.

Good Luck!

If I'm not mistaken, the message wasn't saying you had too few words but that your words had too few letters per word. I've gotten it before too... the trick is that you have to use words with four letters or more. When I searched for "Smart Life Cookie Diet" without the 'for' in the middle I got a bunch of responses... though, they might not all be relevant to what you are looking for...

http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/sear...archid=2734553

No single word in your search terms can be less than 4 characters long. This is because the indexing on a board this size for words like "the" is ridiculous, and would affect board performance.

You can always encapsulate any smaller term in quotations. For example, searching for GoWear Fit won't go through, because the search engine would look for "GoWear" and "Fit" separately, then find all of the instances where both appear, running into the indexing issue. Looking for "Gowear Fit", though, works because it looks for the entire term, in that order. Same with "Cookie Diet". It wasn't a number of words it was rejecting, it was the length of one of your words, specifically "for" in "Smart for Life" and "Fit" in "Gowear Fit".

I agree! Do use another search engine. Who would know to clump the words together?

I have to admit I hate the waiting for 60 seconds between searches. It's just silly.