Click the FAQ button in the header, do a search on the FAQ page for "search" using your browser's "find on this page" (or Edit|Find if your browser has a toolbar) and the third of fourth "found" in FAQ will be a link to Searching for Mudcat Information where three or four different search methods you can use here are described.

None of the methods "searches everything" and all of them rely on "indexes" which may not be up to date, with the possible exception of the threads filter and "Refresh" - but it only finds thread titles that match the filter term - not "things in a thread."

If you have a Google toolbar, there is an option to "search on this site" that you can also try. It is also an "indexed search" but frequently the Google index hits on items here within a few minutes of the first post in a new thread. New stuff seems to disappear from the Google index though, unless the term found gets "enough hits" to keep it at the top of the Google index.

Any search method that actually "looks at the files" to find what's in them would be far too unwieldy to be of much use, for a database the size of mudcat. A search for "files containing a word" just of the threads to which I've posted (a mere 3300 threads - 500 MB) on my own hard drive takes more than a minute of drive thrashing (78 seconds for a "quick test" just now) using the old-fashioned "look at it all" method.

John