For a long time the search functionality on YLF has been an embarrassment to me. We have been using Google’s site search product, but it lacks important features and over the years the ads it shows have become so big that sometimes you can’t even see search results without scrolling.

Many times people have asked for something better and every time I could only agree with them and promise to work on it. And work on it I did. I built a new search function earlier this year and while it was better in some respects, it still lacked some key features. So I decided to go all in and make our own search server. That server is now up and running. Inge, Angie and I have been testing it for a week or so.

You start a search exactly the way you did in the past — just type some words into the search box at the top of the page. On the results page you will see some new options. You can specify “blog” or “forum”, you can restrict yourself to titles only, you can decide whether or not you want replies to be included (or just the original post) and you can specify that you want results from a particular period of time, like the last week, or the last year.

Soon, it will be available to everyone. To begin with we are opening it to a small group of users (patrons) to ensure that everything’s working ok. If you are a patron, let us know what you think of it on this thread. And please let us know if you see anything strange.