The Search Continues...
reply to post by autowrench
Some browser add-ons may block loads of scripts or widgets even if the necessary support (such as Java) is there. As an example, I use Firefox
(version 10 beta, atm) as well as NoScript and Adblock Plus, and both need to whitelist ATS as well as some of the other sites ATS ties into, such as
Google, Google Analytics, Quantserve and so on.
It's just a guess, but I suspect something like that (or perhaps a security setting in the browser itself) may be what's holding up the search
engine load.
Meanwhile, the ATS search feature (in all its incarnations) has long been a source of frustration for members, and we know that. Quite a few staff
members would like more options as well.
Because it works more or less like Google search, the current iteration of the search engine can return quite a few hits. Unfortunately, refining
searches can be tricky, especially if specific terms or spellings of terms are unknown.
Past versions of the search tool allowed for quite a few different kinds of search functions, including boolean operators, but many members found the
options too complicated and searches often seemed to return unexpected or incomplete results.
On the search page itself, there's a little blurb at the bottom:
This is version 1.0 of the ASK ATS engine. Future improvements will include forum-specific searches, the ability to refine your searches based
on the date a topic was authored, the date of a topic's last reply, number of flags, number of replies, and even specific members who replied to a
topic.
It's been there for a while, and Bill has had to juggle quite a few development issues in recent months, but I suspect we'll see more changes coming
to the search feature in 2012.
Please disregard my suggestion 
