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A couple of things bug me about Dakka's search function. And yes, I tried searching to see if these suggestions have been raised before

1. The quick search by default arranges its matches by Ascending Date (which often results in really old posts, from 2007-8 or so, being displayed first), though the normal search feature (where you have to select forum etc) arranges matches by Descending Date, which is far more preferable. I have a suspicion that this is partly what causes threadmonancy in many cases, since a newbie might search for something and try to reply to one of these very old topics.

2. While I think it's handy being able to see the exact posts that relate to the search keywords, I think it'd be far more convenient to arrange the results by topic, rather than by individual posts that relate to the keywords. Searching for a term often brings up the desired topics, but will then go on to list dozens of replies to that topic, even though I have already checked it out. It gets very frustrating to use if I want to find as many topics as possible.

That's just my observation, I don't know how easy they are to change or indeed if anyone else thinks the same.

Agreed on both counts. The second issue is somewhat harder to deal with technically. The search function is loooong overdue for an overhaul, but is such a boring area of the code that I continually put it off for other changes instead. One day it will all get fixed though!

Thanks for the quick response, glad to see I'm not alone in my sentiments. It's not a particularly major thing, I can make do with the current search function as it is, of course.

Thanks again