The developers in my company want to make it so people can search for initials in authors names in our database. What impact would this make on the search engine if they allowed this kind of activity.
Single character searches
Single character searches
There shouldn't be much of a performance impact. You might want to remove "a" and "i" from your noise list, since they're potential initials. (I assume you meant "[\alnum\x27]{1,99}" for your index expression -- "x" for the hex escape -- to match single quotes).
Single character searches
Not quite sure what you mean by \27. The index would certainly grow, which will have some negative impact on performance, although in most cases it will be a small impact. How much will depend on how many single character terms are in the data. You could compare the size of the performance with and without them indexed to get an idea. Searches will perform in a similar manner to other searches matching the same number of documents.
John Turnbull
Thunderstone Software
Thunderstone Software
Single character searches
would using inverted metamorph indexes help or hinder performance??
Single character searches
Depends on your queries. If you're using ranking operators such as LIKEP/LIKER, or might have phrases in your search, then a metamorph inverted index is faster, because it can avoid post-processing in such cases. If neither is used, then a metamorph index may be slightly faster because it's smaller.
Single character searches
E- Mail address for the Texas board of paroles
Single character searches
I think you've posted to the wrong board. This board is for technical support of Thunderstone's product called "Texis". It has nothing to do with "Texas".