OSDev.org

Just an opinion from a newly-joined outsider's point of view.

I have tried to use search on these forums several times in the last week because I don't want to be annoying and post something that has been answered a thousand times.

I tend to search for whole phrases rather than keywords. Is there any way to search for a whole phrase as written out? I've tried quoting out the phrase and this made no change to the search returned.

A closely related option would be to sort the returns by best fit. If more words are found together as written in the search phrase, it should probably get higher priority in the return order.

EDIT;
My current work-around is a google search specifying this URL:

Actually, this is what I do most of the time as well. Unless I'm searching for one specific post of which you remember some data (author, title, subforum), the forum search is infinitely inferior to Google IMHO.

Also, any reason to prepend http://? It works just fine without.

Funny, I didn't check that; I'm on firefox on a fedora-linux machine and it prepends "http://" when I copy something from the address bar.

I suppose it would be hard to match google's search abilities, but it would be so nice not to have to leave this site in order to find something in it's own archives.

Who the hell still uses the forum's search functionality and, more importantly, why? You're using the right solution to your problem.