Omeka Search won't find "Rue"

We have over 8000 items in our archive now and generally can find them. But for some reason, searching for "Rue", a common surname in our entries come up with nothing. Any Ideas?

By default, MySQL's full-text search, which we use for our "simple search," doesn't index or return results for words that are 3 letters are shorter.

You can use the advanced "contains" or "is exactly" searches instead, both of which have no restrictions on word size.

We tried the "contains" advanced search with the same results. We also tried to find "Rue," but got an Internal Server Error. The site is Crossroadsarchive.net if you want to see for yourself.

I do get a 500 internal server error when trying a "contains" search on your site, and it takes a pretty long time to happen.

Your web server should be logging something to indicate what's causing those 500 errors.

To deal with the slow speed of the advanced search (which may also be related to the errors), I'd try optimizing your Omeka tables, in particular the element_texts table. You can do this with a OPTIMIZE TABLE SQL statement, or by using phpMyAdmin or a similar database admin tool.