I just did some searches for the words "airfare" and then "airfares."

All that came up was stuff from 2004 and earlier, and not much of that.

What's happening?

the answer to the question in your heading is "Always".

There is so much good information archived here on fodors, but it's a shame it can be so difficult to find. The search feature here is inconsistent at best.

Try it again..I just did it with the word "airfare" and all sorts of stuff came up from this month!

Search function can drive me buggy, but I've found that sometimes you can get better -- or at least different -- yields by clicking on various different limitations, such as "General Interest" or specific countries -- and you can always find interesting variations by changing spelling, capitalization.

And more often then not you'll find something you're not looking for, but is fun to read, so don't be shy to top it for everybody!

ok thanks.

I've used it thousands of times, including the "airfare" search - it usually brings up anything I'd want to know about.

It's better now. When I posted it was doing what I said - bringing up 3 pieces of junk from 2003, for "airfare, "airfares," for General Interest, or nothing, or UK.

Maybe the censors were at work at that time.

It's always a good idea to hit "refresh" when you get results that seem to be missing more current posts.

Of late, this seems especially true of "click on your own name".

Best wishes,

Rex

The search function itself is poor: it is very primitive and basic search function, with extremely limited options for shaping the search. As if that were not bad enough, it often doesn't work, AND many threads, including some of the best ones, were somehow "lost" and dropped from the indexing system.

yes, rex, I noticed lately that 'click on your own name' doesn't always bring everything up, sometimes I have to click again, or refresh

Oh dear... cmt will understand what I mean by this better than a lot of other folks.. it looks like an indexing "black hole" DOES exist, for some period of time in the past month or two.

Indexing is current from just a few days ago, but I can confirm posts that are a month or som old, and NOT retrievable by any oprdinary search method.

There were two of these in 2003, I think, and they were never fixed, as far as I know.

Sheez...

What I think is wrong with the search feature: it doesn't use a concordance. Therefore the software has to search through the all of the text of all of the posts to find matches on the search criteria. That would take a lot of work to fix, though.

But before they do that, they might give some consideration to a fairly simple change that would speed up the site enormously: store threads and posters' contributions as linked lists rather than searching the entire database every time users click on a thread title or username. By doing this, they could get response times down to the sub-second range.

The search function works irregularly. So does clicking on you name. Recently the list that comes up when I click on my name is almost always out of date.

Keith

It's working much better now. Thanks.

Although it's not so helpful for general searches because it doesn't show thread titles, a google search can be great for trying to pull up specific threads.

Try to choose search terms that would be in that thread (obviously!) and wouldn't be too common, then do an advanced search at google, restricting matches to the domain name www.fodors.com

See http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34620862

My previous speculation that another "black hole" might exist looks to be wrong - - the entire past 29 days is a "black hole" for which no searches work.

Hey, Doug Stallings, please take a look at THIS thread, and countless others, on the lack of indexing for over six weeks, rendering any search of recent posts impossible!

I have been using the site-specific Google search to find threads on this forum when researching hotels, but even that is far from perfect. I get some results from the search feature here on Fodors that I don't get from Google, and vice versa. Oddly, it can help to limit the search to General Interest or the specific country.

I have located recent threads using site-specific Google searches.

Well, I've looked, but I can't help you much. This is a technical issue with which I have absolutely no expertise. We do know that the search function is primitive, and I've heard they are trying to improve it, but that's really all I can tell you.

Well, thanks for responding - - but there ARE technical people who (I believe) know exactly what needs to be donme - - RE-INDEX!

I have received correspondence from such technical staff in the (distant) past. Can you not tell the right people to tell the right people to come here and take a look?