I'm going to use this as a place to discuss search, how to use it and what people want to use it for.

A few things:

• When you use multiple words in a search, the default is to perform an OR search. Searching for curly perm will turn up both curly and perm and will list first results that have both terms.
• Searches are case insensitive. Perm, perm and PERM are all the same.
• Searches are made for roots, so perm, perms, permed and perming are all the same. But permanent is a different word.
• A plus symbol in front of a word in a search means that word is required so curly +perm will return only results that have some form of perm in them and will prefer ones that have curly, also. +curly +perm results must have both words though not necessarily next to each other.
• A minus sign means do not include the following word in results so perm -curly would return results that matched perm but would not include ones that also had curly.
• Quotes around a phrase will search for an exact match, but will still ignore case. "curly perm" will match Curly perm and lots of variations but both words in that order must be present.
• Comments are regarded by search as part of the post.
• The sidebars allow you to restrict searches to posts that match various criteria, like type of post, audience rating or authorship. At the top right is a sidebar that allows you to control how the search indexer orders results.

When we upgrade to Drupal 7, this will all change a bit but not drastically.

You can use this thread to ask questions and make comments about search.

Happy searching!

Hugs,
Erin, Piper and the rest of the staff