The search function doesn’t seem to go very far back, not coming up with results I know exist.
Is this just a setting thing and I’m not doing it right?
The searchability of the forum is one of the big advantages over Facebook etc.
Can you please give an example so that we have a chace to investigate this issue? Do you find this post / thread you’re looking for manually?
It goes as far as the oldest post, but results are filtered by “relevance” and display 50 max results.
For example, here’s a search that shows posts from 1993:
If you can’t find what you’re searching, maybe you can add some filters, but as @Eric_aus_Chemnitz said, give an example so we can check: categories can have specific search settings.
We used to use Google Adsense’s site search to pull in google’s index of the site. Not sure if that option can be easily added, but it gives another algorithm at searching the forum. It also provided just a little bit of revenue as they would put some relevant ads as they do with search results.
There’s something: https://meta.discourse.org/t/easy-google-search-bar/108460
But as it is, it’s not very elegant and takes some space.
Discourse’s default search engine works usually well but maybe the quality of the results can be impacted by 20+ years of posts, especially if these posts lack some data that may be used by the search relevance algorithm.
I use some Discourse forums daily (including one migrated from phpbb, but way smaller than unicyclist.com!), and I never really had issues with the search, as opposed to older search engines where I’d often use google instead.
EDIT: there was a typo in my search, my phone is autocorrecting “schlumpf” to “Schlumph” 
I was searching for the schlumpf hub serial numbers reference thread.
On my phone when I search “Schlumpf serial numbers” I only get one result, a post in a thread called “Unicycle security” from Dec 2017.
But on the computer I get 38 results with what I was looking for as the first result.
It might be an issue with the mobile version only?
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Happened to me as well… 
I have another issue with searching this site with Google search. I used to use it all the time on the old forum and it worked very well with many options to the search including images (I don’t see an option to search for images on the new forum search).
Now when I search using Google and select (under the advanced options) the www.unicyclist.com/ site or domain I get a listing of search results. That part works as before. However when I click on any search result I get " Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private." at https://unicyclist.com/archive/index.php/t-60068.html
Just to add to this, the forum previously made a little money from Google’s adsense search, turning links to affiliate links via Viglink (now Sovrn Commerce), and donations. I’d recommend at least putting the Viglink code back on the page as nobody has ever complained about that unless it breaks the destination link. This means the site gets any commision if a sale happens on a site that viglink works with, so it’s mostly free money to pay for the hosting and anything else we want to do with the site in the future.
I did my best to redirect old links, but for various reasons, it was a really difficult task and many links couldn’t be properly redirected to new links.
We’ll have to wait so google remove old links from its results…
Why not, can you tell me more about it so I understand 100% how it works? Does it add referrals on links on the forum or something like this?
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I tried searching for an old (2002) post I made that I happened to remember the exact title (an adventure in descending). I was able to find it but it wasn’t as easy as it could’ve been. The default search by relevance did have it although I had to scroll down a long way. There are other options like searching by most recent post, but of course I would’ve liked to have searched the opposite way - for the oldest matching post.
Anyway, glad you figured out the spell checking issue and I’m really glad all the old stuff is still around - pretty amazing. Hats and helmets off to Gilby and everyone more recently who had a hand in making this happen!
Then you can search by title using the advanced search features, or directly write “in: title” in the search field.
Is there some reference to the “in: title” and other search tricks that are available? Searching past threads is one of the most valuable features of this forum and knowing all the options of how to use it would be most useful.
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Yes:
Go the search options:
Then as soon as you check or set a setting in the search options, the related parameter is added to the search query:
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Thanks! That works great!
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