Katie:

Forgive my being uppity, but we are travelers, you know - - and your reply sounds way too much like "we realize you have been inconvenienced" - - when an airplane has been stranded out on the tarmac for seven hours.

...it's not "the search problems as of late" (makes it sound like the last few days or something) - - the problem was over a month old when you sent me a reply on July 30 (now two weeks ago).

And I feel 99% confident that "that indexing is not occuring (sic) properly in some cases in the Forums"... is also a gross "mis-underestiamtion" of the problem.

There has been no indexing of any kind, of even one word, in the message header, in the body of the message, or the e-mail address(es) of those who post - - not just "in some cases".

The airlines ae starting to use a little more common courtesy and decency in informing passengers truthfully when something is not performing right. Fodor's would do well to follow that example.

Looking forward to a proper fix of the problem.

Another two weeks, plus... and still no fix...

Hi Rex-
I wish I had a better update. The search problem turns out to be bigger than our past quick fixes. The good news--it's a major priority right now. The bad news--there's not a quick fix. While we are in the process of addressing our current search woes, we're also on the look out for more long term solutions. Please see this post to give your suggestions: http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=35058660

Well, a prompt, and more forthcoming reply, at least...

The workarounds I know...

It's the newbies who suffer from a non-working search function. And the continuous influx of newbies is more vitally important to the life of this forum than any other thing that comes to my mind.

Why don't you use Google Custom Search?

It's free, and it can be implemented in 10 minutes.

http://www.google.com/coop/cse

It's a very good question. I can't count how many universities and similar, very large organizations with big unstructured "piles o' files" use google search right on their web site.

Not sure how/if Google site search implemented here could carry out boolean queries (especially across "fields" - - i.e. "screen_name=rex _and_ message_header=problems" - - but then, we can't do that right now either).

I leae for France today. When I started planning this trip, with a flurry of questions here in June, I would have never believed that the search function would end up out of commission form late June until now - - with still no end in sight, and no response to the straightforward question of why Fodors (Random House) wouldn't consider using Google search right ON this website to replace its long-ailing search function.

I guess they think they reached "Mission accomplished" some years ago.

No improvement, years later.

Sent to [email protected] again today.

rex - hope you're having a good trip. It seems like the search function is finally working now.

A fully upgraded search is in development as we speak; it should be out later this fall. Rex--- I hope you are enjoying your trip. I know our IT team did investigate using Google search but it was not the ultimate choice we went with. I'll inquire with them as to why it wasn't the right pick for the site.

Thanks for thinking of me while i was gone, yk and katie... as katie's message indicates, the "fix" is not in yet, even though there seems to be some proiperly working functionality for posts started recently (just not posts started in late June, July, August, and maybe most of September). This "black hole" phenomenon happened at least two or three times before. I hope it can be eliminated with the new solution under review.

This thread itself provides an appropriate test. Search for the word "Muscadins" (in the OP's message) - - as of right now, this thread does not come up.

Oh, and yes, we had a good trip. Details to follow...

Welcome back, rex.

I plugged in "Muscadins" in our test search; guess what came up first? This thread. Encouraging.

I meet later this week with the developers so I should have an updated progress report then.

In any project which is in progress, encouraging feels better than discouraging. But _completed_ will fell better than either.

I will be glad to do some test runs on any new implementation. For now, what we "end users" can "see", for results, remains largely unchanged. Quite new threads are getting indexed, but there remains the giant hole, spanning late June through sometime in September.

You met "later this week" (referring to the first week in October, Katie?

and... ???

I would like to see the requested search word(s) highlighted in a contrasting color in the matching threads. This saves a lot of time wading through sometimes lengthy threads to find the post(s) with the pertinent info. Thanks.

An improvement on that would be to return only the <u>posts</u> with all the search terms in them, as opposed to the <u>threads</u> as is currently done. Frequently one search term will be in one post, another in a different post, and so on.

&gt;I would like to see the requested search word(s) highlighted in a contrasting color in the matching threads. &lt;

Since you have to open the threads to search them, you can just do &quot;CTRL+F&quot; and enter the words you need.

I hardly ever used the search function, but today it seems it's returning much more comprehensive results. Maybe the &quot;new look&quot; is more than just look. They actually fixed/improved the search function.

Nope. Just did a search for a word that appeared in a post dated 10/03/2007.

Result: Zip. Nada. Zilch.

Darn. When I saw the new layout, I hoped that meant the search function was fixed, too.

Alas, I just searched on a hotel in Paris and the most recent thread it returned was from May. I've discussed that particular hotel several times in the last few weeks. So---no fix.

It's even worse. The &quot;find in this page&quot; and &quot;CONTROL + F&quot; functions no longer work.

Those functions only found the search word in the thread titles on the left. It no longer found the words in the thread itself. We're going backwards!