Great discussion everyone and big thanks to PC for starting this up!
A few thoughts:
1. This is HUGE and most important for helping others: Be VERY detailed in your new thread subjects!!! Instead of: Help, sick chick post Help, chick with yellow growth on middle leg. Try to use up the whole thread subject line with good keywords. This makes search infinitely more powerful and easy to use.
2. When searching, first do a search only in subjects and if you dont get many results, then do a search in subject and message text.
3. As mentioned, searching is an art, but a skill everyone should seriously develop and practice (not only for this forum, but search skills are becoming more and more important every day).
4. Show results as posts and then use the browsers find function to search the screen for words to quickly access those parts of the posts within the search results.
5. On the home page of BYC there is a Google search bar that searches the whole site including the forum. Give that a try and play around with it.
6. Dont be afraid to try advanced search tools:
One of the more powerful features of the search is how to use wildcards. These wildcards make search VERY powerful on a forum, especially one with as many posts as we have here.
"Using an asterisk at the end of your search term will find many variations of the term you seek.
Example: If you enter the Search: child* you'll be returned with information on children, child, childs, etc.
You can also use other "Boolean search operators like AND, OR, NOT.
Learning how to use the asterix and the AND OR NOT and you'll be able to find pretty much anything you are looking for.
Oh, here are some geek links if you really want to be a search master:
Cool video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vube-ZcJFk4
Reading:
http://www.le.ac.uk/li/sources/subject3/physics/ist/boolean.html
http://photoswest.org/wild-bool.html
Really geeky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_logic
