I am coming to the conclusion that the forum's search engine is completely off its rocker. Two recent examples:

Searching for the word "sire" (Match any words, Search title and content, Search in Archives) returns one match from 2002:

http://fmforums.com/.../page__hl__sire

Searching for the word "herd" (Match any words, Search title and content, Search in Archives) returns another match, this time from 2001:

http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/8589-connecting-fm-to-fm/page__view__findpost__p__32216__hl__herd

But searching for the words "sire herd" (Match all words, Search title and content, Search in Archives) discovers yet another match from 2006:

http://fmforums.com/...hl__+sire +herd

So here you have a thread that won't be found searching for "sire" or for "herd" - but will be found when searching for "sire" AND "herd"??!

Another example: searching for the word "seriously" (Match any words, Only search in titles, Find author: "comment") produces the message:

No results found for 'seriously'.

whether searching either 'Live content' or 'Archives'. Well, I beg your pardon, but ...

http://fmforums.com/...s-us-seriously/

Also, what's this "Archives" thing? How am I supposed to know if the thread I am looking for is archived or not? Not to mention what we teach newbies here about splitting one entity into two tables...

Thanks for the info - for starters there was a new feature added a while back called ARCHIVE that based on settings would archive topics that met a certain threshold think i had it setup for 5 years or older. The the system would move these older threads into another table - thus speeding up searching ( in theory ) as its only searching thru recent history of < 5 years.

But as you noted it's not perfect - and confusing for people - Newbie and Veteran alike.

I have turned it off and now the system has to go thru the process of un-archiving the 68896 topics or 80% of the sites content. It will take time to restore these to the main table.

I am going to investigate the other search terms you've indicated - and also examine using Sphinx (A Search Server ) again in lieu of the traditional sql style searches.

I know it's not perfect but an alternate way to search is: using google adding site:forums.com to as a suffix to your search request, sire site:fmforums.com or herd site:fmforums.com

the archive engine has been disabled and all historical threads are merged back to the main tables.