The search function on this site is not working for me. It returns a page not found error each time I try to perform a search. Has this been disabled to decrease server load?

I find that it is very sensitive. I can only get it to work when I am on the home page.

No problem for me. I just started a search (advanced search) from this page, and it works just fine.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

Search me, it's working fine here.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Well, you can't speak loudly to it, or glare. It will get upset and not find anything. Saying things like "Good Search! Good Search!" when it finds what you were looking for can help reinforce its self-esteem and assist it in getting over its sensitivity. Of course, never mention its inability to discriminate between upper and lower case letters. It'll just go off in a corner of your page file and sulk.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Maksutov gives me 25 pages and 289 threads. Salute!

Weird. I came back today and tried several searches again, all failed with a Page Cannot Be Found error. This was after I was redirected to search.php. I'm guessing it's load related, since this seems to be a busy site. I'll try back later tonight and see if I can pull one off.

I've noticed that it seems to exclude all three-letter words as search terms. So it won't execute a search for e.g. "gps" or "esa" which is unfortunate.

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"I have a cunning plan that cannot fail."
S. Baldrick

And a lot of four-letter words as search terms, like "Mars," seem to take so long that the browser times out.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

According mostly to my article in the Bug Bin topic -- might as well reproduce them in this special topic -- these probably frequently used words can make a search fail:

Moon, Planet, Earth, Mars, Space, Universe, Theory, Evidence, Science, Wrong, Show

(Hmm, in trying to find a few more, "according" gives back a result that the word is too common; maybe all those above words should at least do that.)

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Not so now. It appears that a search on any one succeeds. (But a search on more than one at once may yield a memory error.)

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Okay, I'm going to run some database repair utilities and rebuild the search database. This could cause a drain on the system... but our new server can handle it.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Okay, I rebuilt the search database. Search seems to be working now, but please let me know if you see a problem with it.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

I have found I can only view my thread list if
I have logged on. Is this deliberate? It
denies this facility to guests suddenly.

I don't understand. Guests can't have a subscribed list. You need to be logged in so the system knows whose list to display.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

Well I have been able to look up a member
profile and see thier posts or threads without
logging on. Now I can just see the posts, the
thread option returns a search form that does
nothing!

I just duplicated this. The profile option to list the posts of a user works, but not the list of threads started by a user.

I haven't been able to use the search function at all, when I log out.

Okay, this is probably another index that needs to be run. I'll run the rest of them now.

__________________
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

I've been trying to use the search function and all that happens is that I'm brought back to the search screen. Any ideas why?

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

I did a bit more testing and the error appears to be more specific. Search doesn't work if I try to search by both a keyword and by a poster name. If I just search using one or the other it works.

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

Usually, that means that the particular search was unsuccessful. Are you saying that there are posts satisfying your criteria though?

PS: just tried to search for this post with "unsuccessful" but it seemed to work both with or without poster name

I agree it could be a more informative screen

for searches for things older than a few days google toolbar has a site search which works very well.

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Brian's mother: He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy!