Lost my search function on Drupal 4.7

Here's the scenario -

I was moving an old web site -- and saw the huge number of searches and thought that they were bloating up database. I cleared out the searches and search index file.

Guess what?

When I tested the search in the new installation I got very few or no hits.

What to do?

I did a number of searches on the problem.

Like

Drupal 4.7 search broken

Drupal 4.x search problem

Drupal 4.7 search won't work

nothing seemed to work out

I tried editing a few posts and running cron.php after each edit. Those posts showed up in the search.

Then reading another bit of advice - I saw that I go to

Admin
Settings
Search

and if you change the number of letters you use as a minimum the site is reindexed.

I changed the number a few times - also I set the number of nodes reindexed in each cron to 50.

After doing that enough times to cover the whole site I had my index restored and working.

Good news -

Right?

Right!