Suggestions

ha ha, I did an advanced search and got 300 copies of the same message totally unconnected to my seach !!!

And now, I try to do a search -- using both "advanced search" and the search box at the top of the Ancestors board -- and I get the error message ...

So I did a google search

site:www.genesreunited.co.uk "[name I was looking for]" janeycanuck

and found the thread (from 2007) in 0.21 seconds ...

actually a dysfunction? I have never seen such a useless "tool".

(And yes, I have gripes I've been saving up for a long time, and this is one of them.)


It used to be that the search boxes at the top of the individual boards produced results quite quickly. No more.

Also, it used to be that on the Boards Summary there was a search box that could be used to search all boards at once. No more.

Now we're stuck with "advanced search", more appropriately called "prehistoric search", if you ask me.

I find myself in an endless loop -- sometimes it truly is endless, unless you count giving up after 5 minutes as not endless -- of "Your search results are being prepared and you will be redirected shortly".

On and on and on, round and round and round.

And then there's the fun bit, when the search result includes a thread that is 20 pages long, and doesn't direct me to the page of the thread that the search term is on.

I'm looking for "Jane Doe" in Place X because I think there are multiple posts on the board about the same thing and I want to know what has already been found and posted before I put time and effort into it. The thread shown in the search results is a 20-page thread. Obviously something has been posted in a "look-up thread". Am I going to go through 20 pages to find what it was? Nope. Who loses? The poster, because at that point I'm probably just not going to bother.



A workaround for anyone trying to search the boards here.

Use google and make the site url your first term, then add what you're looking for -- e.g. this will find you a thread of mine:

site:www.genesreunited.co.uk "mary ann fallowell"

(removing the quotation marks will find a different thread)

and it will do it 70 brazillion times faster than using "advanced search" on here will do it. It just took a full two minutes to get those results.

It will probably only find *recent* posts since google has only started systematically indexing pages here relatively recently. But for posts of the current date or a while back, it will get you instant results.

(And this is exactly why the Living Relatives board is problematic ...)



I don't want to have to find workarounds. I want the features of the site I pay to use to work.