I don't know about anyone else, but I've never had a problem with the old search and think that it is fast enough, thank you very much. Is speed what this is all about? I won't even pretend to know a single thing about such technical matters, but FWIW, I'm fine with the old way. I'm sure they're working on it (we need an icon for "keeping fingers crossed" - maybe they can get to work on that next!).

I too am baffled that a more stable search engine cannot display results in a variety of useful ways. Let's hope that the subsequent development gets us back to where we were, albeit without slowing the site down, which I guess is the instability cited.

I'd like to be able to see threads to which I have contributed to see whether there have been responses since I last looked without having to click through the threads to find out when I made my contribution and whether there are other submissions I haven't seen.

On both searches I tried the result page has the moderation drop-down menu. I'm not a mod, so this should really be looked into.

P.S. And no, I don't like the score thing and the linking-to-the-first-milepost-in-a-thread-instead-of-the relevant-one thingy one little bit.

Honestly, this adhoc change reflects an arrogance matched only by legacy airlines, major US political parties, and eBay. It screams "We did what was convenient for us, whaddya gonna do about it? Where else you gonna go?"

The legacy carriers are mostly bankrupt, 'nuff said.

The political parties are a mess of infighting at the moment.

eBay is learning its lesson as traffic was down in 2007 compared to 2006, with professional sellers moving to Amazon and the local sellers moving to craigslist.

Disregard your user base at your peril, lest some of your talented and influential users leave and work to build your competitor. When your community mods are unhappy enough to speak out publicly, you have serious problems.

I guess the fears voiced by users when Randy sold FT to IB are coming true.

I'm in the minority, but the new search just takes some getting use to. I've not had any problems finding any thread I search for or listing links.

Was that RBP mine? :eek:

Problems: Search by User
 

I just did a search by user for my user name for 1 day for all posts.

Problems: Search by User:

1. Search didn't find my last 3 posts, which were anywhere from a few minutes old to 12 hrs. old.
2. Results shown don't show my text, only the (partial) quoted text (unless I didn't quote someone) - this is a new problem - it used to start with my text, which is much more usable when searching for a post by a user.
3. It's only 74% sure it's relevant even when sort by Post date is used (it does sort by date, just lists this idiotic "relevance" also)! How can it not be 100% since it was one of all my posts?
4. Post time/date on search results don't match time/date on the same post when clicked on from the search results. Example: Search results lists "02/07/2008 22:26:51", but actual post lists "Today" [08Feb], "1:26 am".
5. Moderation drop-down menu at the bottom of the results. - Should this really be there, or is it there but non-functional except for those who actually have these privileges?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by your "the linking-to-the-first-milepost-in-a-thread-instead-of-the relevant-one thingy," but if you mean clicking on a thread title in the search results takes you to the first post in the default page of the thread - it was that way in the old search also. You have to click on the link inside the actual quoted post, below the "Posted By..." link.

The performance problems had nothing to with the speed of search requests. Rather the old search engine was bringing the entire site down.

I was close to walking away for a while and I'd rather FT perform well in the interim while they hammer out a new search engine rather than timing out and having connections reset yet having the (theoretical) capability to use the old search engine. YMMV.

I'll have to agree with you on that one, but there are serious issues that aren't being addressed here. The least they could do is acknowledge the issues and post them along with the status in a single master post. A lot of us would be okay with the problems (for a reasonable length of time) if they're acknowledged and a status is posted for each one.

I think that's because there's a delay of at least 12 hrs. where posts don't show up in the results. (see my post earlier on search by user problems)

EDIT: That's annoying for a regular FTer, but a major problem for a moderator! Mods and Admins should have real-time access to a list of posts by any specific user, even if it can't be available to the rest of us..

I agree, but I don't have any confidence that this is going to happen. I was more confident when Randy's crew was running the show, to be honest. IB doesn't seem capable of telling us anything -- they remind us of airlines obfuscating the reasons for flight delays in that regard. I hope they prove me wrong, but I have my doubts.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with that also. The moderation drop-down issue a few of us have mentioned should really be looked at soon.

I agree with you that the FlyerTalk's performance of late had been very dismal, and the elimination of the traditional search engine has appeared to rectify the underlying problems.

But why is it that FlyerTalk seemed to run fine for a long time -- subject to occasional disruptions, some scheduled, others for emergency maintenance -- with the traditional search engine intact? Though I have zero experience or knowledge of web development, it seems improbable to me that the traditional search engine was the cause of the mayhem or that getting rid of it was the only way to solve the underlying problems.

I will second that, as the site was becoming pretty much inaccessible. The problems I encountered would definitely seem to have disappeared with the replacement of the old search engine.