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For some reason, searching for 'make' in any of the Stackoverflow engines returns a page saying "Please enter some text to search for in the upper right!"
This doesn't appear to be length related; searching for net and home work fine. Is make a reserved word somewhere in the search validation code? I was attempting to search for anything relating to GNU Make on serverfault when I ran into this issue. Very frustrating.
Even given jjnguy's explanation: entering text, clicking 'search', and then having the system tell you "You didn't enter any text!" seems like bad UI.
At least, it could say "The following very common words were excluded from your search string: ...".
Make is a very common term in every day language. Thus it is filtered out.
Jeff has a blog post about this.
Stop words are words so common they are typically ignored for search purposes.
make should probably be included in the search, though. Perhaps StackOverflow – like Google – should include a way to explicitly search on a word, even if it ordinarily would be a stopword. That way, we wouldn't end up with a make or "The Who" situation.
One way to work around this is to search for the make tag. Bracket the word [make] and it will allow the search.
[make. No wounder why I didn't find anything.