Has anybody ever figured out how to get the forum search to give usable results? I always either get no hits (e.g. today I'm getting no hits for any searches), or I get hundreds of hits for postings completely unrelated to what I'm searching for.

The "unrelated hits" situation could be vastly improved if people would quit putting lists of keywords into their signatures. It nice that you have a PVR-350 board, but when I search for "PVR-350" I end up with hits on every post you've ever made even when the post as absolutely nothing to do with the PVR-350.

It would also help if there was a way to search just subject lines or a way to search for multiple-word phrases.

Yes, I know nothing's going to change, but I feel better now.

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Grant

I've posted some hints on searching in the past. Mostly they're just common sense things, like trying alternate terms (use a thesaurus if necessary), alternate endings (plurals, -ing, -ed, ...), looking at the size of your result set and trying different terms if it's too big or too small, how to scan the titles and threads quickly for relevance (breadth first search)... Using a tabbed browser helps a lot because you can open a tab for a promising looking thread without interupting your scan for potentially more relevant results. Sometimes the first search is just to find the right terms to search for, and sometimes there's just nothing for it but to plunge into a big thread and use you browsers page search to look for where the keywords appear...

Aaargh.

I just figured out what I've been doing incorrectly for at least a year or two. When I wanted to search for "all terms", I clicked the radio button and entered the terms in the lower text entry box (the one immediately below the "search for all terms" button).

I completely mis-understood the layout of that table. I saw the vertical dividing line and overlooked the horizontal one. In my mind, both textboxes were grouped with the radio buttons.

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Grant