There's a lot more wrong with the search engine than has been discussed. Despite C_Watkins' statement, finding a phase by enclosing it in quotes does not work, anywhere on the site. For instance, searching for "Super Tiger" (using the quotes), in subject only, finds a thread entitled "thunder tiger super decathalon 40 ?" (with NO replies), and an thread entitled "Good first speed plane" with no replies containing the word "Tiger". In general, you can't search for a phrase. This is further compounded by the aforementioned shortcoming of the results linking to the thread, as opposed to the specific posting.

A pet peeve of mine connected with this is the inability to search for two character words at all (no, you can't find "my". Or YS, or ST, or OS, or JR, or many other useful two letter combinations). This is a fairly severe limitation in my opinion.

I would also like to suggest removing the ability for changing the subject line on a reply. This causes all manner of mistaken matches, and makes it more difficult to find exactly what you want when just searching bodies (the poster frequently doesn't repeat the subject words in the body).

Is there a help page describing how to use the search facility? If there is, I haven't been able to locate it. What does that "Less precise match" box do, anyway? And just how (and where) does wildcarding work?

Add all that to the goofy errors that commonly occur (no, I can't think of the specifics of one right now, but I'll post again the next time one occurs), and you have a pretty brain-dead search facility. Since RCU uses "forum matter as a future reference" requirement as a defense for strictly enforcing off topic deletions and thread moves, I'd think that a top notch search facility would be the number one priority. In my opinion, the current search facility prevents RCU forums from being a great reference.

FYI, see the GoogleGroups search facility (http://www.google.com/advanced_group_search) for an example of a good search facility. There is nothing personal or malicious intended in this reply; I think RCU forums could be the absolute final word in R/C information if a good search facility were in place.