As IB-Dick says, there are continuing problems with indexing which he is trying to address so I guess one should continue to experiment/think laterally in the meantime.

When I searched not specifying titles I got 147 hits.

Some of those hits did have the word in the title but in the form "Superman/Batman". Maybe superman* would work better....?

I'm not sure whether capitalising also makes a difference, I didn't check any further.

Here's an example:

I picked up the seventh season of Smallville on Blu-ray during that ridiculous sale at Big Lots. I watched a few episodes last night, kind of completely hated 'em, and was curious what the folks here thought when the episodes first aired.

So, I went to DVD Talk and searched for "smallville".

There were two threads from yesterday.
One thread from 2008.
One thread from 2005.
All the other results were from 2002 or before.

It's missing years and years of threads. "Superman" has the same problem. Between 9/12/04 and 6/9/09, there's one result...five years in between (when Superman Returns was released too!) and one result. Another example: I'd expect a search for "veronica" to turn up some threads about Veronica Mars, but between 3/2/01 and 6/9/09, there's exactly one search result, and there's not a single Veronica Mars thread from TV Talk in there.

The strange thing is that it's not consistent. There's not one stretch of time where there are no results for any search term. The size of the gaps vary depending on what you're trying to find, and sometimes there are seemingly no gaps at all. If I search for "raimi", I get tons and tons of threads. I could paginate back and see a thread every few weeks from as recently as the past couple of days, and I didn't see any missing spots for the first few pages of results.

I can still find things using Google, though.

I thought I was time travelling. The last few searches all resulted in dates 2004 and older.

Well, you need a Blu-Ray player to view anything newer!