As many of you know, we had a major crash at Mudcat in the summer of 2005. Max and Jeff worked hard to recover from the crash, and almost everything is working properly now. The restoration left a few glitches - some confusion of thread/message numbers, and some incorrect numbers on the Forum Menu about the number of messages in a thread.

There is one thing that is still not working properly, and that's the Search function, which depends on an index. Since Max and Jeff still have some refining to do on the recovery, they have not updated the search index since 2005 - and that means that our primary search engine does not cover any messages posted since 2005.

There are ways around that problem, and I've tried to spell them out in detail in the FAQ (click) - these workarounds are available on the Old Advanced Forum Search in the QuickLinks dropdown menu on almost every Mudcat page. In general, I think the best way to find a thread is to use the Filter to find by the thread name.

But the workarounds aren't completely satisfactory, so I keep looking for new ideas. The most obvious possible solution is Google, and John Mehlberg and others covered that idea partly in this thread (click).

I had some time today, so I went to the Advanced Search function at Google to explore our options. The "advanced search" allows you to seaarch a specific domain like Mudcat, instead of the entire Internet. If I use Google to search Mudcat for "Oak Publications," I come up with this (click)

You don't have to go to Google Advanced Search to do a site-specific search for something. If you enter "oak publications" site:mudcat.org in the Google search box, you'll get the same results. Note that I put "oak publications" in quotes so Google would search for the exact phrase, instead of the two words separately. Also, note that Google apparently does not index ALL of Mudcat, so some things won't come up.

OK, now I wonder if anybody has any other ideas for searching Mudcat in the lack of an update search index, or if anybody can do some fancy HTML and come up with something that would do a Mudcat-specific Google search. How about using Google for searching just the Digital Tradition?

Any Ideas?

-Joe-