What is the reason that searches are limited on these boards so that you have to wait 120 seconds between them? Sometimes when I search I have a typo or realize my search wasn’t specific enough and get too many hits. Why must I then wait to try again?
I’ve a tendency to double click if the page is a bit slow loading and it is as annoying as all hell for about 119 seconds.
Back in the old days, the hamsters running this place were too weak and feeble to manage something as big as a search without a good nap and a three-course meal between attempts. I suspect the current setup could probably survive without the limitation, but no one’s bothered to change it. I could be wrong. It also provides a brake on malicious people who could try to bring the place to a halt by running zillions of searches.
I search the SDMB using Google. Seems to be a much faster and accurate way of doing things.
Here’s a link to how to use Google to search SDMB much faster and with more specificity than the board’s own search engine can ever hope to do: Google search of SDMB
I did that once and discovered the Giraffe boards and what the people there thought of me…:dubious: 
Happens to me often too!
When I became a moderator about 10 years ago, I used to run IP searches on trolls. A search shut down the board for about 45 seconds at that time. Now, that doesn’t mean it would shut down the board for a poster doing a search, but I think that was indicative of how limited the board capability was at that point.
Popping in with the obligatory reminder that waiting time between searches used to be five minutes until a few years ago.
Since the topic has come up again, could someone repost the great SD/Google hacks that two smart Dopers came up with?
Then I could use it to find the hacks if I had a time machine.
And we liked it!
The problem with Google is that it can’t search for posts by a particular user. Which is what most of my searches involve. Only the native search function knows how to do that. To Google, “posts by Cheshire Human” (using my name as an example) is meaningless. It won’t give you useful results.
According to this thread of Google search tricks, you can do:
site:boards.straightdope.com "Find all posts by Cheshire Human"
I got thisresult, which seems to work. I didn’t click on all the links to verify, but the few I checked popped right to posted by you.
Actually, I just found one where it gave me the post AFTER yours…so it seems like it’s close, but not quite accurate.
Cool! Thanks, I’ll try that next time and compare results to the native search function.
Back in the day, searches involved climbing up and down rolling ladders, copious note taking, oil lamps, and penny candy.
Today, that same search still involves climbing up and down rolling ladders, copious note taking, and oil lamps. But the candy costs about $1.99 these days.
Obligatory complaint that Google actually misses a lot of semantic information, as the text is all just words on a page to google. There is no way to find only posts/threads where a specific person said a specific thing, for example. The only reason google can even find posts from a specific person at all is a hack that relies on the fact that the string “find all posts by <username>” appears in the HTML at the top of each post. If I include the phrase “find all posts by Cecil Adams” in my post, then using the Google-fu others have come up with, this thread will come up in a search for posts by Cecil Adams. Note also that the google solution sucks if you have your “posts per page” set to a higher number than the default, because if google thinks a post is on anything but the first page of a thread, the link is going to be wrong (e.g. if google thinks a post is on page 10, it’s probably on page 4 for me).
Using google is hokey and shitty and makes me kind of embarrassed that the administration thinks it’s a substitute for a working search function. It has its benefits, but it’s not correct to act, as many do, like it’s got no drawbacks.
It’s an engineering job. Outsource it to Marley. Or kick the brownie back to India.
Be grateful: the time limit used to be 5 minutes.