The problem here is that 120 seconds apparently must elapse between searches, even if no actual search was made.
I was trying to see if there had ever been a thread about a dog, specifically, Rin Tin Tin. So it turns out the search thing will not do three-letter words (which I knew, but had forgotten).
So I immediately went to try again using rin-tin-tin. Nope. Gotta wait two minutes, even though the first search was not actually a search.
Just the right amount of time to type and post this message. I’m betting it won’t work as a hyphenated search term either.
It seems to me that, if the search terms are not met by a given search, the search mechanism should somehow SAY THAT rather that just penalizing you for putting in a term it can’t find anyway.
Although a null-result search bypasses the cost of building and displaying a list of threads, it can still cost as much as successful search in terms of system resources; IOW the system needs to do just as much processing to determine that a keyword isn’t indexed as it does determine the opposite.
One improvement that occurs to me is automatically eliminate chronological filtering when a single thread is searched. If you search for a name or a quote in a five-year-old thread, the time constraint should not default to “two months ago or later”.
And finally with regard to names, it must be the case that the universe of Doper screen names must be far smaller than the universe of SDMB keywords, so would it be possible to eliminate the 120 second waiting period on a zero result name search?
Here’s how I search the Straight Dope Message Board.
I go to Google and type “SDMB: Rin Tin Tin”. (Without the quotes BTW.) The first few hits will be from the Dope, and then “More results from boards.straightdope.com” will appear right under that.
