BK Lick -

An advantage of the Google toolbar...

To get to the "Advanced Search" you have to open a Google Search Page, and then put your search string in and tell it what advanced features to use.

With the toolbar in place, you always have a search box where you can enter what you want to search for, and if you've added that one tiny button you can immediately search on any site where you have an open page. You can do a site search on any site you can open a page on, and you don't have to spell the name of the site carefully if you're already at the site.

Not a big-deal difference, but I find the Google toolbar fairly unobtrusive and quite convenient. Suit yourself.

If you want to look it up at Google, you can teach yourself to write the search string in the form that includes a site to be searched, and there are numerous other "specifications" that can be included. Without the toolbar, you'll still have to open a "Google" page to have a place to type in the correct search terms.

From a link in a recent thread:
For example, typing tips site:pcmag.com will limit your search to tips stories on PCMag.com

Typing:

"anything you want to search for" site:mudcat.org

should search only at mudcat.org.

The simple Search box at mudcat searches using only pre-set index pages. The index pages have not been updated, so far as I've heard, since sometime before the big crash.

The "Advanced Search" also searches using only pre-set index pages. I believe that an update to the Advanced Search threads and DT index was done sometime since the crash, but no subsequent update has been made so far as I know. Unfortunately "index" wasn't one of the keywords added to the index, so I'd have to go through all of the posts by Max (most likely) followed by all by Joe O (who might remember if he'd reported it) followed by all by Dick G or a few others who might have made the report in order to find when the last update was done.

The "keywords" that are indexed include some "main title words," some "first lines," a few "repetitive lines" or "characteristic terms" along with specific keys descriptive of genre or perhaps linking "trad" titles, and a few other kinds of "keys" that I'll leave as "miscellaneous." NOTHING ELSE can be reliably searched for and found using any built-in mudcat search utilties.

The thread "Refresh" button, using a filter word/phrase, can find words used in thread titles, but cannot search content within threads, and at present can't conveniently go "back to the beginnings" due to a limit on the number of items that can be returned.

Google actually can look within threads, but will return results only if it's new¹, becomes and remains popular as a search item outside mudcat, or is linked to by lots of external sites.

¹ "It's new" probably explains why you found "strained brain" here. Quite likely, a week or two from now, you'll get NO GOOGLE RETURN on that same search phrase; although there's no way to predict accurately what Google will do.

Some months ago, or maybe some years ago, I believe that Max reported that the mudcat threads database had "passed 600 MB." While not huge by current standards, allowing each individual who was curious to launch separate word-by-word searches of the entire database could potentially eat a very large bit of bandwidth. It likely is not in the best interests of mudcat to provide that kind of a search capability.

Should it be considered useful, perhaps an archive "threads" CD set or DVD could be made available to those interested, and they would be able to use their own computers offline for such searches; but I've heard of no plans for any such issue.

If you have the downloaded DT, you should be able to figure out how to do a word-by-word search on the data files, on your own machine and on your own time, although I frankly haven't tried it to see how well it works.

John