Search never works for me

**Santiago** · Jun-09-2006, 8:57am

I'm fairly technical and can usually figure these things out. I'm selecting a forum, etc., but can never seem to get either any search results or any search results that are remotely relevant. Thanks for any help you can provide. I'd do a private note, but I assume there are more like me.

**picksnbits** · Jun-09-2006, 9:17am

Are you selecting anything in the "Search From" dropdown?

**Jerry Byers** · Jun-09-2006, 9:34am

As suggested, you might increase the time range. Also, the use of Boolean's will narrow the search.

**Ken Sager** · Jun-09-2006, 9:41am

If you type in a string of words it'll find all posts with ANY of the words in your string. Be as specific as possible in your search, and use booleans as Jerry suggests.

Searching for "leather strap" returns 18 threads. Searching for "leather AND strap" returns 4.

**rhetoric** · Jun-09-2006, 9:48am

The problem could be that the default setting is for stuff that is really recent. So you search for "Mandolins and Athlete's Foot" and get nothing because nobody has talked about mandolins and athlete's foot in the past 30 days, but trust me, somewhere on this site is a thread about mandolins and foot problems -- and anything else that can be talked about. Scroll to the bottom and then change the settings to "the beginning" and "or older." At that point you might also want to limit the search to "titles," otherwise you'll get 10 pages of mandolin/athlete's foot threads.

**Tom C** · Jun-09-2006, 10:15am

I started a post on this a couple of months ago. Try searching for it

Seriously. I did. It is very primitive. You can not search for strings or use single or double quotes. So if you are searching for "Gibson Mandolin Case", you have to specify: Gibson and Mandolin and Case. -And just deal with everything else that fits that criteria.