Search term requirements too large re: minimum amount of characters

Seeing how this field of interest has many three character acronyms, can we at least get the search term requirements set so at we can get hits for such terms as TRT, T3, HRT, LR3, HCG, IGF, AAS, HGH, etc...?

As it is now, we get a terse response saying there are no hits for that term. One would think that there are no instances of those terms anywhere on the board. Why should we always have to use Google's built in search feature, since we are then only getting responses for pages that Google has previously crawled?

For example, in google we have to type in hcg site:forums.steroid.com just to see the posts containing that term, and we know that result is not complete. An onsite search capability for shorter words would be helpful, if it can be done.

Maybe it would make the index slower, i dont know the reason for that rule.

There are a lot of different threads for those things. I would think they would yield too many results (which is already a problem with one word terms).

You can use " ___ " to specify search terms, ie "HGH".

Keep in mind this site has been around for decades so what may seem simple on paper is not always the case to implement on the backend.

We do also have many stickies on various key topics. For example Austinite's T3 protocol is still valid as of today. Since so many protocols change, it's not always in the best interest to pull up tons of old information. Cycle theory or nutrition theory from say 2002 is very different from today. Science evolves as well.

With most of the more sophisticated search engines you can limit the search to a single website by using the "site:" flag (the word 'site' followed by a colon [:] followed by the web address), like so:

T3 site:forums.steroid.com

I tested it on DuckDuckGo.com and it came back with a shit-ton of hits. Several pages, all exclusively from forums.steroid.com.

Yes, thats what I wrote in my original post. it is a great feature of many search engines.

I just thought a website should at least be able to perform the same kind of search.

You could integrate google search into vBulletin so that could lift the load of search from the webservers, let google handle the shit, vBulletin has a plugin for that afaik.
vBulletin is an old script, which still use an old relational database management system, and returning many records from database puts a heavy load on the CPUs, since DBMS performs the search operation exhaustively, which is lacks the direct access benefit of hashing in the newer DBMS products(which is hundred times faster, if not more).
FYI, tech team.