This new one is driving me nuts. I can't hardly find things anymore that I know for sure exist.

I'm nonetoohappy with it either. Needs a lot of development work.

'can hardly', btw

I also thought the older search engine was far superior to the existing one.

The older search engine IS better, but that was from the old forum software (different company)

There is a lengthy discussion of pros and cons at vBulletin's own board <A HREF="http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=10566&highlight=search+engine" target="_blank">here</a>.
The top of page two was particularly informative when I skimmed through it.

Is the search even working more than about 5% of the time? I usually get no matches to things I know must exist (like my own posts), or one match when I know there are many more.

I haven't been able to find anything I've looked for lately.

I know this is a stupid question, but I've done it myself too many times...under the search forums drop down box, you are changing the default from "search titles only" to "search all posts" right?

Though I agree, I'm not too happy with the current search engine, either.

-David

Right. And I'm chosing the correct forum and expanding the date ranges. I used to be able to handle the old one. It does seem that it can never find matches in the posts for me, only the title. I've tried it both ways. Maybe I'll see if it works differently in IE.

I think the search engine ignores words of 3 characters or less.

If you're doing a search on your username, then that's possibly why you aren't finding anything. You might try experimenting with some temporary changes to your username to see if it makes a difference.

-David

I even took out my username eventually, just looked for a string in the thread. Nothing.

Now I tried it fresh, without my name. It found a bunch of matches. Then I tried it with my name and it found what I was looking for. Doing it in the opposite order gave me nothing even though I was not doing subsearches or anything. Strange.