PLEASE tune up the search feature...

Maybe I'm just using it wrong, but the forum searching seems remarkably fickle. I searched for the keyword "jail" for posts under my name, and then for ones with the keyword "clear". The keyword "*jail*" caused the system to just sit there, waiting to load the results (or lack thereof)...

JP, could you either clarify how the search engine works (are these 'keywords' officially added or something?) or fix an apparent bug? I mean, I eventually found the thread, but that was when I simply looked at my own posts with a time-based restriction, and browsed.

One other thing, you can sort threads by last POST time, but it would be wonderful if you could sort threads by the thread-origination time, if looking for something related to a news event, for instance.

Wow, what a time saver it would be to sort threads by the thread-origination time. Nice idea, Terr.

That really is a genius idea. I very often have that I search the forum just for fun and read something that's already a year old.

I agree with Terr. I would really like to know what's going on with the search feature. When I first started visiting here at AO, I constantly heard people telling the newbies who asked stupid questions: "That question has already been answered. You should have searched first." I've noticed recently that I don't hear that nearly as often, because anyone that has actually tried to use the search engine recently knows that the search engine is pretty unreliable these days (even for threads that you know the title of). Generally, when I try searches, the search engine might come up with a few forum threads that are really recent (never more than a month old) and lots of the really old newsgroup crap. Why does it search correctly for the newsgroups, but not the forums?

Solution: Google.

Quote:

---

The Google Search Appliance puts the power of Google's renowned search engine on your network. A fully integrated hardware and software design enables users to plug in and start searching in less than an hour. And once your crawl is up and running, the Google Search Appliance finds more of the documents your users are looking for, returning results with the same high relevance users find on Google.com

---

http://www.google.com/services/index.html

For more information on search solutions and google, go to this address: http://www.google.com/about.html

The only problem is that Google probably does not support all the nice other search features of searching by username, in certain forums, at certain times, etc.