i've noticed this for a long time now.. when i search for things, lots of stuff doesn't show up when it's suppose to..

for example, i was in the TV Talk forum, searched for "Thief", and this thread didn't even show up, it's the most recent thread too with Thief right in the title:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=464041

there are lots of things wrong with search

The search isn't perfect, but there are advanced search options, one of which is "search titles only". This has your link as the second result.

Google has ruined people.

Yeah, you have to go to the advanced search. The search feature has a glitch and if you do a regular search it doesn't search titles and thus misses stuff.

Among other problems.

And it's not google ruining things, the search here just sucks compared to other sites in general.

google has nothing to do with it
search here has gotten progressively worse
other forums I frequent, with similar amounts of posts, have more accurate search mechanisms

No, it does. It's the Google-mindset where you don't have to put any thought whatsoever into your search, and get frustrated when you don't get the results you want. People want to type random keywords into a box without thinking about it and get 100% accurate and quality results, and that's never going to happen.

The problem here is you can type 5 out of 6 words in a thread title your looking for and it often won't find it if you don't go to advanced search and make it search titles.

Its not people typing random words, it's the that the search is sucky (as Geoff himself has said) and further limited by bandwith contraints requring 4 or more letters per word.

But even if that wasn't the case, I still don't get your point. Companies like Google come along and raise the bar, and people should expect that quality everywhere, and complain when they don't get it. That's how you spread quality innovations.

No, I get that the search is broken. It should index the thread titles.

I'm in library school, so we sit around a lot and lament the lack of a coherent search process. Google is great, but it has "dumbed down" people's searching skill. People have no idea how to structure a search, use Boolean operators, etc. If you sit down at a terminal, fire up an online journal index, and search it as though it were Google, you're not getting anywhere.

I know, as grad student I do a lot of searches.

But I don't blame google, I blame the online journal indexes for not catching up yet.

I added a new search link to the front of the forum:

<a href="http://www.google.com/custom?domains=forum.dvdtalk.com&sitesearch=forum.dvdtalk.com&client=pub-1670216450445443&forid=1&channel=2882123274&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%23008000%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A%23336699%3BVLC%3A663399%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BLBGC %3A336699%3BALC%3A0000FF%3BLC%3A0000FF%3BT%3A000000%3BGFNT%3A0000FF%3BGIMP%3A0000FF%3BFORID%3A1%3B&h l=en&q=dvd">Search</a> - it's google powered. Lets see how that goes

I'm as big a proponent as anyone of a Google-type indexing search for journal indexes, but I'm not in denial about how much work it would be for the index companies. Plus, Google's index system (pagerank) wouldn't really work for journal indexes.

I still don't think it's any excuse for search laziness.

I'll admit to having whined about the forum's search feature as of late. That being said, am I just having some sort of brainlock this morning or has there been another change in the search option (besides the addition of Google search as mentioned by Geoff). The forum's search feature (besides Google) now only seems to appear when I'm logged in. Is this a work in progress or is that the way it is going to be from now?

we've disabled searching for non registered or logged in users (i.e. guests cannot search) in hopes that it will cut down on some of the problems (slowness & the search disabled message)

Just wanted to note that the google search link you provided works great. I've been able to find the thread I've wanted (at the top of the list) 99% of the time using it when the forum search comes up empty a lot of the time still if you don't go into advanced (which takes much longer than the google option).