Marc,

Thanks for the pointer - that makes a great deal of difference. I admit to having been lazy to this point, and not having tried everything out on the search page. I stand by my statement that there should be a search help page (linked from the search page), though. If that had been there, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

As to the Google Groups search, yeah, you're right, they're now a billion dollar corporation. However, the "groups" portion of Google is actually the former DejaNews, which I have been using since the week it launched in 1995. I can tell you that the search facility there has changed very little from the original one, and all the major features were there to begin with. At that point, it was garage business, not a Wall Street tycoon. A little effort and some programming expertise is all it takes.