The Forum Search is a strange beast. It depends on an index, so the search is effective only for posts before the date the last index was generated. Oftentimes, posts newer than several weeks old won't be displayed. It's also set to ignore search terms that appear too commonly. In this folk music forum, the word "seeger" appears lots and lots of times, so the Forum Search won't find it. It will find Pete Seeger, however - but the results list is so long that nobody is likely to read it. Same with "grateful" vs. Grateful Dead. In a forum with 3.7 million messages to search, some search terms are just too common to be useful. In our QuickLinks dropdown menu on almost every Mudcat page, you'll find a selection for Old Advanced Forum Search. That page is kind of a Swiss Army Knife of search tools, many of which are also found elsewhere. I find the Filter (at the top of the list of threads on the Forum Menu page) to be the fastest and most reliable way to find threads on any given subject. I put a pertinent word in the Filter box and set the age back (usually to "all.") Over the years, I have routinely renamed threads and messages to that they'll have expected keywords that will turn up in the Filter. So, if your thread title is nonspecific or spelled wrong, it's likely to be changed to something that's more clear. No personal offense intended. That Old Advanced Forum Search also allows you to search the forum by the name of the poster, or by the title of the individual message within a thread (did you know that you can change a message title before you post it). In messages that have lyrics for songs, I put the word ADD and the song title to help people who are searching for lyrics. If the lyrics are incomplete or are a duplication of what's already in the Digital Tradition, I don't always change the title. I've been indexing and crosslinking messages and threads since 1998, so there's a lot of good stuff to find here if you know how to find it. You'll find more search tips in the FAQ, along with a few other search engines that you won't find anywhere else. Some people complain about the FAQ because they say it's too long. If you start at the top of the FAQ and use the index, I don't really think it's all that hard to use. Most of the information you need is in the first ten messages of the FAQ, and there are links to all that stuff in the FAQ Index. There's discussion of other matters down below, but the permanent stuff is in the first ten messages - and those ten messages are updated as needed. Our main search engine is intended to be "quick and stupid." You can put your search term in there and click "search," and most of the time you'll get pretty good results. To get more accurate or more specific results, you'll have to read the directions. What can I say? -Joe Offer, Mudcat Music Editor- One little tip that might be helpful: almost every Web browser has a built-in search engine that allows you to use CTRL-F to find a word or phrase on the page that's displayed. I'll often put one or two words in one of our search engines and bring up a big page of results, and then use CTRL-F to search for a second term to narrow the results. My search engine of choice is a two-stage search using the Filter and then CTRL-F
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