Jake, I don't know if this message has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching you but I pray that it does. I appreciate your comments about the ease of use of the new search capabilities but there is one thing that has left me dumbfounded the past several weeks. Why, in God's name, do you want to make it so difficult for us to get to the point where we can do a search? -------------------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------------- MESSAGE FROM THE ROOTSWEB HOME OFFICE by Jake Gehring, RootsWeb Executive Producer Our message boards improvements continue this week. My comments regard the search features in the new system. Sometimes certain boards and the messages they contain have been moved since they were initially indexed -- when you search and try to view posts, you get an error message asking you to check back in a few hours. In some cases this message lasts a lot longer than expected. We're changing the error message and working hard to fix the underlying problem. I'll report the status of this issue next week. Generally, however, we hope that you are impressed with the new search features. The new system shows search results ranked by relevance -- meaning that the system will display the best hits first. For example, messages that contain all of your terms are ranked higher than those that contain only some. Here are a couple of additional search tips: Wildcard Searching. The new message boards allow wildcard searching as long as the user specifies at least the first three characters in the word (i.e., users can search for "gehr*" to find "gehring, gehrig, gehrke," etc.). Search Operators. New functionality allows users to add powerful operators to their search terms to affect results. These operators, the plus and minus signs, are placed just before your search terms and function like popular Internet search engines Yahoo! and AltaVista. If you put a plus (+) sign in front of any word, that word *must* appear in a message for it to be a match. If there are terms that you want to exclude (you don't want to see messages in which these terms appear), you can place a minus sign (-) in front of them. For example, a search for "+gehring heinrich -baden" will return only those hits that contain the word "gehring" but not the word "baden", and in this group any messages containing "heinrich" will be displayed before those that don't.