I find the internal search function almost useless, at times. First it doesn't take three letter words or smaller - which are important and essential at times. Next, it NEVER lets me make a second search. It will tell me flood control is activated, please wait 20 seconds - but no matter how long I wait it says the same. Third, it seems to be additive, not subtractive [targeting] the additional search terms. If I put in, for example, death 'persons name', it pulls up all thread with word death - not those with death and that person's name! It causes, out of frustration, the starting of a new thread, when I know there are [somewhere] old threads on the topic. Sometimes one can do a google search and find it, sometimes not. Is there no way to get a new internal search function [even insert google or some other within the Program]?

I also find problems with my Opera software and the Program when I'm entering text. The text box takes a long time to load and it is not clear when it is fully loaded. To try to do anything before it is causes problems hard to recover from. Then, if I type something and try to go to bold or underline, etc. with the mouse the whole text box jumps off screen. Text I type is often broken-up in ways I did not want and some letters removed at the end or start of these artificial line breaks. I have the latest version of Opera. More times than I like, a text entry will just disappear when I hit Post New Topic, or post twice, and of course we are not permitted to correct the headings should we have made a mistake or care to. Frustrating.

I agree. This is why I created the JFK Index, although very few members seem to use it. The best way to search the site is to use Google. Type in "Education Forum" and the JFK keyword and Google should find it.

My experience has been that the search function works fairly well. I find the advantages of being able to limit the results by date, forum/subforum and poster outweigh the disadvantages. To make searches subtractive one needs to use plus signs thus if they want to find threads/posts where both 'death' and 'kennedy" are mentioned the proper search would be +death +kennedy.

It does have some limitations AKAIK you can't search for a phrase and there is the 4 character minimum search string. If Andy could get rid of the later or reduce it to 3 characters it would make the search function more useful. Another change I would recommend would be to change the default search mode from showing results as threads to showing them as posts. I imagine the latter would be more useful in most cases it's the one I use about 90% of the time.

If one prefers Google typing site: educationforum.ipbhost.com after the search terms will only return results from this forum.