My question has to do with keyword searching and is based on the first sentence of the following statement of the user’s manual regarding Searching ( Troubleshooting):
“MySQL considers terms that appear in over 50% of indexed items to be so common that it excludes them from keyword searches. The easy way to tell if a term meets the the 50% threshold that’s at fault is to choose the “boolean” search, as MySQL does not apply the 50% limitation to boolean searches.”
The archive I’m working on will have a local town’s name in many of the indexed items. At this point of the project I don’t know if the town’s name will reach the 50% mark. I understand the “workaround” mentioned in the second sentence, but is there a way to change the MySQL setting?
I don’t believe there’s a way to turn off that 50% “feature” besides doing a different kind of search as the manual suggests.
Some things about the fulltext behavior are settings you can change with MySQL server settings (like the minimum length of an indexed term), but I believe that threshold is baked-in.
There’s a possible option that would involve editing the database (if you have a new enough MySQL version): Omeka uses a “MyISAM” table for the fulltext search for compatibility reasons. Changing that table to use InnoDB instead should remove the 50% restriction.
I’m still having issues with the search feature. I chose the Boolean search and tested it but it did not solve the problem. When I search on the name of the town, which will be featured prominently in the archive, I get “0” results. (Many items need the name of the town mentioned in their Dublin Core fields )
If I attempt the last option of changing to InnoDB in MySQL will that cause any other issues to develop?