OK. Maybe “notwithstanding” is a word you’d rarely find around here, but I DID use it here, and it was used by another poster here and here. Search fails to turn up any use of it at all.

I farted around and seemed to find a limit of 10 letters, as “considering” (11, and the first word I could think of) doesn’t seem to work. Nor does “consistantly” [sic](12), which I cut-and-pasted from here.

So, maybe Search just doesn’t like TVTalk, thinks I. I toddle over to Other (prolly a mistake trying to find anyone who would use an 11-letter word, but…) and found “Palestinians” (12) which won’t work. Cut-and-paste again, and, yes, I did remove the hanging space after the word. AND I set the search to go back a year, tried all 4 different combinations for results (post/post, post/ thread, thread/thread, thread/ post), and with/without hanging punctuation.

Blinkeedoodle doesn’t work, either.

So, the rule is, 4 or more, but no more than 10 and no wildcards. Truncating a word does not cut it. Does this about sum it up?

Also, since the wildcards are turned off, it might be handy to remove the reference to them on the search page.

I can only get the search engine to work with ONE word.

so that's why most of my searches fail, no wildcards even though the search page says so

Yep.

Note to everybody: if you use the wildcard, your search will fail.

Unless the asterisk is part of the word you seek. As in, "geof*" will not get you either geof or geoff. But it will get you geof* since that exact word is around here in a coupla places.

Well, the 10 letter limit explains a lot to me also. I couldn't get "ghostbusters" to turn up anything when trying to find when the last time it was on sale.

I have to give up trying to find specific threads all too often. Usually the only keyword I remember is only three words, or the search won't pull up multiple words, and I have to try to figure out which thread out of fifty is the one I'm looking for. No wonder there tends to be so many duplicate threads.

sorry our search engine is greatly limited due to the size of the index. We're hoping to improve it with the next forum major version we use. (which will be VB3)

EDIT AGAIN: Never mind. I should learn to read the entire thread; I guess ten letter limit means there's a ten letter limit. I'm a dumbass.

Even if you search for a large word like "transformers" (as in the DVD set that came out on the 26th, with this thread devoted specifically to it), it still is pulling up no results.

Edit: Sorry, the set comes out in on the 26th, according to Amazon. My bad on the date; I still can't search for the word, either as "transformers" or "Transformers". This thread doesn't show up, either.