I dont understand why we dont just disable the search function completely and let Google crawl the site. After the first initial crawl the bandwidth it took up would be minimal. Now that we are a money making entity it would bring in tons of visitors and return better search results anyway. In the long run (even short term, probably) it would likely speed up the board since no one would be searching it. Google is now capable of crawling dynamic sites, and Googlebot also respects a custom wildcard (*) so you can specifiy that its not allowed to crawl member profiles, individual posts (only full threads) etc…
I suppose I’m not completely familiar with all of Google’s capabilities. How would you phrase your google search to return all posts in the last week from a particular group member?
Google’s support for recent searches kind of sucks, but its there. You have to use Julian dates.
Your search would like something like this:
site:boards.straightdope.com daterange:2453104-2453111 +“RM Mentock”
Google also has an interesting new number range search that could be used to pinpoint date ranges in several different ways. For example, next week you could have a search that looked like this:
site:boards.straightdope.com allinurl:4762125…9999999 +“RM Mentock”
Where 4762125 is the oldest post you are willing to view and 9999999 is the newest (allowing for them all to be shown)
You can even get manual with it, specifying certain days only.
site:boards.straightdope.com “03-28-2004” OR “03-30-2004” OR “04-03-2004”
You can do this of course because the dates are written out exactly like that on every post.
Here is a tool that allows you to search Google using Julian dates.
I’ve had persistent problems with Search since the vB upgrade, not only for finding old posts but new ones as well. Something as simple and straightforward as “show me all the threads I posted to within the last week” leaves off enough hits as to have caused me to use my browser’s History instead.
Actually, there’s still a small problem. If you have more than 500 posts older than 1 year, you still can’t get the oldest this way. But if you select “sort by ascending date”, you can get your 500 oldest posts. If you have more than 1000 posts older than 1 year, you can only get the 500 earliest and latest, and you can’t get the ones in the middle this way.