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Three-letter calls in search

michael hagerty

michael hagerty

Never noticed this before, but I was trying to look up "KYA vs. KFRC" just now and the software excluded both "KYA" and "vs." on the grounds they were too short and just gave me KFRC results.

So I plugged in a whole buncha 3-letter calls (KFI, KNX, WLS) and got the exact same result.

Is this fixable because...radio?
 
michael hagerty said:
Is this fixable because...radio?
Click to expand...
Not with this software. In general most internal search engines require four characters. I just did a test "KGO" search on RadioInsight using the built-in search there and it will bring results of 810 San Francisco, but also 105.1 KKGO Los Angeles and 92.3 KGON Portland among others.
 
Same with a amateur radio board I help Mod at. A few Hams have 3 letter calls and the software chokes or fires back gibberish. The admin their plans to tweak stuff in the admin panel and hopefully don't blow things up. As long as I can remember most forum software needs 4 or more.
 
Negin said:
Same with a amateur radio board I help Mod at. A few Hams have 3 letter calls and the software chokes or fires back gibberish. The admin their plans to tweak stuff in the admin panel and hopefully don't blow things up. As long as I can remember most forum software needs 4 or more.
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How many hams have 3-character calls? I'm guessing none. Calls like W1A or N9V are strictly for special event stations and are temporary and frequently reused. Everybody else has calls with 4 to 6 characters (7 for Foundation licenses in Australia). Or are you talking about calls with 3-letter suffixes like KA6AAA, which are most of them, and have been since the 1960s?
 
radiofan2023 said:
Would using -AM or -FM make any difference for searching this board or not?
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Not unless the post included that in there. A search engine is only as good as the content it archives. As noted, this isn't a radio issue but rather that search engines need at least four characters to decipher content better. Maybe the FRC was on to something a century ago when it stopped issuing three letter calls :)
 
They probably had a feeling this new fangled internet thing was coming down the pipes! :ROFLMAO:
lanceventa said:
Not unless the post included that in there. A search engine is only as good as the content it archives. As noted, this isn't a radio issue but rather that search engines need at least four characters to decipher content better. Maybe the FRC was on to something a century ago when it stopped issuing three letter calls :)
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Those are the calls I was thinking of - the special event ones.
KeithE4 said:
How many hams have 3-character calls? I'm guessing none. Calls like W1A or N9V are strictly for special event stations and are temporary and frequently reused. Everybody else has calls with 4 to 6 characters (7 for Foundation licenses in Australia). Or are you talking about calls with 3-letter suffixes like KA6AAA, which are most of them, and have been since the 1960s?
Click to expand...
 
wadio said:
Try: "*KYA*"

It's four extra characters to type but it works.
Click to expand...

Beyond Wadio's suggestion, I would also add the frequency after the quotes, so my search would look like "KYA"1260. That usually brings up decent results.

Speaking of irks with search engines, particularly Google, here is a more recent one and it's a pet peeve of mine. With the development of so-called AI (artificial intelligence for those not paying attention to the news), Google will, if what you are searching has very few entries, assume you are searching for something else and give you the entries for that something else instead of what you were really looking for.

A good example is KAWQ-FM, the just-on-the-air NPR affiliate from Quartzsite, AZ. Normally, when I look up this information, I use startsearch.com. It doesn't provide as many results as google.com but it doesn't have the AI problem either.

Putting in "KAWQ"90.1 into Google a month back (it may have changed since) resulted in a note from the search engine saying that I didn't really mean "kawq" 90.1 but that I meant "kawa"90.1 (actually it's at 89.9) licensed just outside of Dallas, Texas. Adding Quartzsite and Arizona to the Google search didn't help any--I still got the results for KAWA.

Fortunately, I did find a few results using startsearch.com but it sure bugs the hell out of me to have the AI of a search engine say that it knows better than I what I'm looking for. Phooey! If that's how searchers *really* want Google to search for them, then perhaps I'd better stick with startsearch.com.
 
ted chittenden said:
Beyond Wadio's suggestion, I would also add the frequency after the quotes, so my search would look like "KYA"1260. That usually brings up decent results.

Speaking of irks with search engines, particularly Google, here is a more recent one and it's a pet peeve of mine. With the development of so-called AI (artificial intelligence for those not paying attention to the news), Google will, if what you are searching has very few entries, assume you are searching for something else and give you the entries for that something else instead of what you were really looking for.

A good example is KAWQ-FM, the just-on-the-air NPR affiliate from Quartzsite, AZ. Normally, when I look up this information, I use startsearch.com. It doesn't provide as many results as google.com but it doesn't have the AI problem either.

Putting in "KAWQ"90.1 into Google a month back (it may have changed since) resulted in a note from the search engine saying that I didn't really mean "kawq" 90.1 but that I meant "kawa"90.1 (actually it's at 89.9) licensed just outside of Dallas, Texas. Adding Quartzsite and Arizona to the Google search didn't help any--I still got the results for KAWA.

Fortunately, I did find a few results using startsearch.com but it sure bugs the hell out of me to have the AI of a search engine say that it knows better than I what I'm looking for. Phooey! If that's how searchers *really* want Google to search for them, then perhaps I'd better stick with startsearch.com.
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Thanks for that site, I hate Google’s autosubstitution too.
 
Theater of My Mind said:
I've never heard of that site and when I tried it just now, I got a domain for sale landing page.
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And you are correct! I goofed! The search pa
ge's actual address is

Startpage - Private Search Engine. No Tracking. No Search History.

Search and browse the internet without being tracked or targeted. Startpage is the world's most private search engine. Use Startpage to protect your personal data.
startpage.com startpage.com

While I've always assumed the site's name is Start Search, the site's url says otherwise. I apologize for the error (because I think I should have known better).
 
I think AI should be known as "Artificial Idiocy."

Here's another anecdote:

My mother recently wrote out a check to the mechanic for getting a car fixed, and when the mechanic went to cash the check, it was rejected. The reason? The name was backwards ("Last, First" instead of the usual "First Last") was rejected by the bank's AI. The worst part of all is that there was no way to override it!

It's bad enough that companies are stuffing "AI" into everything, but now they're trying to simultaneously take away all the traditional options and lock everyone into AI exclusively, with no way to override it.

That seems profoundly stupid to me, because time and again, AI has proven itself to be completely inferior to humans for almost everything.

And this new ChatGPT 5 being hyped as being "Ph.D" level? That's a farce, too. Reportedly, it is so stupid, it actually makes its former self look better, and that's a pretty low bar!

And the punchline is that the joke is on the AI companies themselves, because despite all the hype, they haven't been able to actually makes a product that can make the money they've been promising to their investors (for example, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has yet to make any profit at all, yet is valued at billions of dollars. The main reason why they still exist is because investors keep blindly throwing them their money), so the bubble they're living in very well may burst sooner than later.

c
 
cc333 said:
My mother recently wrote out a check to the mechanic for getting a car fixed, and when the mechanic went to cash the check, it was rejected. The reason? The name was backwards ("Last, First" instead of the usual "First Last") was rejected by the bank's AI. The worst part of all is that there was no way to override it!
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Don't bet on that ever being fixed. Banks have been trying to get customers to stop writing physical checks for some time now, and this glitch just gives them more "reasons" to cite in that campaign.

I happen to believe in paperless transactions (even though I do have an AI issue with one of my restaurant apps which I am working with the company to fix). All of my financial statements are downloaded by me from password-protected servers. All of my credit card payments are handled electronically by my credit union. I do not carry cash, other than the envelope of dollar bills I keep in my car for tipping valets on the infrequent occasion that I need to (most often it is when I visit one of my doctors, who is based at a hospital which does not have self-parking as an option).

Surprisingly, the one non-paper payment method that I do not use is my credit union's debit card. I instead use my credit cards as cash and just pay in full every month. There are four cards that I use regularly and I match them by category to their 3% cash back categories: One is for groceries, one for pharmacy, one for restaurants, and the fourth is 2% on everything else. I even pay my utilities via credit cards; my electric and internet bills are on a card with 5% cash back and my wireless is on the same card as the restaurants (which also extends the 3% to self-parking and EV charging).

I haven't written a check in so long, I locked them away in my fireproof documents safe just so I would know where they are. The debit card is only used for ATM deposits when I receive a paper check from someone, and I can activate it just for those transactions and deactivate it afterwards.

Maybe it's time for your mother to get with the program.
 
cc333 said:
Maybe, but the mechanic was the one who wanted the check (versus a credit card), so, maybe he should get with the program :)
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He had better be a damned good mechanic to be worth the hassle.
 
K.M. Richards said:
He had better be a damned good mechanic to be worth the hassle.
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I don't really think of writing checks as a hassle, nor do most of my friends (granted, the average age of most of them is somewhere around 70).

I think he's a pretty good mechanic, but I'm still waiting... the engine broke in our Subaru, and he replaced it. We had it back for one day – ONE day – before the engine (or something) conked out like the old one did. On a busy highway. Stuff happens, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt if he can fix it for real this time.

c
 
K.M. Richards said:
Don't bet on that ever being fixed. Banks have been trying to get customers to stop writing physical checks for some time now, and this glitch just gives them more "reasons" to cite in that campaign.

I happen to believe in paperless transactions (even though I do have an AI issue with one of my restaurant apps which I am working with the company to fix). All of my financial statements are downloaded by me from password-protected servers. All of my credit card payments are handled electronically by my credit union. I do not carry cash, other than the envelope of dollar bills I keep in my car for tipping valets on the infrequent occasion that I need to (most often it is when I visit one of my doctors, who is based at a hospital which does not have self-parking as an option).

Surprisingly, the one non-paper payment method that I do not use is my credit union's debit card. I instead use my credit cards as cash and just pay in full every month. There are four cards that I use regularly and I match them by category to their 3% cash back categories: One is for groceries, one for pharmacy, one for restaurants, and the fourth is 2% on everything else. I even pay my utilities via credit cards; my electric and internet bills are on a card with 5% cash back and my wireless is on the same card as the restaurants (which also extends the 3% to self-parking and EV charging).

I haven't written a check in so long, I locked them away in my fireproof documents safe just so I would know where they are. The debit card is only used for ATM deposits when I receive a paper check from someone, and I can activate it just for those transactions and deactivate it afterwards.

Maybe it's time for your mother to get with the program.
Click to expand...
I'm with you on all that.

The only exception is my cellphone bill where T-mobile removed the credit card auto-pay option and I had to submit to ACH auto-pay.

Another problem with paper checks is "washing." I personally know two people who had checks stolen out of their mailboxs and had large amounts of money removed from their accounts.

Those credit card points really add up, especially with utilities. But you have me beat on the %'s.
 


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