I am getting odd results searching for "visa bonus" on the AA forum. Instead of getting results from the aa forum alone, i'm getting results from all flyertalk forums and that's true if i search from the forum search or I do an advanced search supposedly limited to the forum.

makes the search tool pretty useless

Last week I searched Coupon Connection for a thread that I wrote, and found it. While I didn't pull it up using dhammer53, it did come up when I typed in USAir. :confused:

Yesterday, I was searching the Starwood forum. I typed Kauai into the search box the same way I've done dozens of times before. This time, search returns anything ever written in all forums on Flyertalk.

Can someone please tell me how to pull up the Starwood forum? And don't suggest 'advanced search'. That does the same thing.

I can just see all the hard work of the various master threads going down hill.

Dan

IB just implemented a "faulty" fix days ago. Please see the short reply from Mikel in the Search Problem Master Thread.

Thanks for that. I just booked a trip to Hawaii, and was about to begin my research. So I guess I'll be spared hours and hours of fun until search is fixed. ;)

dh

In the meantime, here's a link to a sticky thread in the SPG forum, with direct links to the master threads for all SPG properties in Hawaii.

Search is broken yet again!
 

Tried to pull up my posts for the last week. Stupid machine responds, "Nothing found to match your search request" even though I've made posts during the last week.

Can't anyone get this to work right? If not, can we go back to the old version, please?

Yes, I was able to see plenty of your posts in the last couple of days by using my suggested approach (sorting by "Author") in another thread.

There are quite a few problems with the last implementation of IB Beta Search Fixes since last week. See more discussion in the Master Search Problems Thread (post#288 and beyond). IB hasn't announced the release date of the next fix though.

I can't imagine what kind of "search hell" our mod team has to live in right now. :(

I believe that the point many of us are making is that we don't desire to jury-rig our searches to obtain some half-baked results. We just want clear, accurate results. This morning I tried yet again to find some answers to questions related to an upcoming project for one of my groups, and got two results.

1. Nothing.
2. Unsorted garbage.

We had a perfectly acceptable search engine, and now it has been replaced with a tool that increases frustration and reduces the value of FT.

Deleted Posts still show up in search results.
 

I know this was mentioned several times in the search problems thread, but I don't see any update in the FlyerTalk Search Updates announcement. This can cause a great deal of confusion, since clicking on the deleted post will take you to the spot where that post would be, if it weren't deleted.

Mikel has explained elsewhere why the old-gen search engine was not "perfectly acceptable" in the context of FT traffic volume. That said, the new system isn't working at all and should not be online.

Just to boot the sleeping dogs again...

Does the forum software have the functionality (and is it feasible to support) the ability to search in our mailboxes? If not, to do some kind of sort of messages?

Otherwise, is it worthwhile doing an export, in order to do such a search?
Thanks.

Since the thread has been revived ... where is IB on this issue? Is it a situation now where "it is what it is" and just deal with it or is there active effort to address the search and its current lack of functionality and usefulness?

Some aspects of search are quite strong - if I want to serach just my own threads for a link I know I posted by can't find any more, for example. So searching by user or forum seems to work pretty well.

But for broader search FT search is often inferior to searching from google. For example try searching on <status match master thread> both on the main FT page and on the main google page. For broad serches I often end up using google with <flyertalk> as a keyword, with much better results than using FT search.

It would be even better using advanced search with flyertalk.com in the "Search within a site or domain:" field.