Thanks.
I did several searches first, but it doesn’t work for squat.
External Google searches are far superior but then posting becomes an administrative multi-site chore and other negatives.
Plain-text search has been around a while as has threading.
Imagine a FR where you didn’t have to wade through 50 replies to find 2 decent ones, and then wade through another page of 50, and another...and where plain text Search just works.
Heh...
Same here — I wind up relying on Google, particularly when hunting for some topic or specific post I remember, it’s just faster, and sometimes (often) turns up related stuff I’d not previously seen. I keep this bookmark on my browser shortcuts:
http://www.google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&source=hp&q=+site:freerepublic.com/focus/&gbv=1
That opens up a Google search with the “site:” modifier in place, so I only need to add what I’m looking for. Uh, disclaimer, this isn’t guaranteed to work, sometimes the wording I remember isn’t exact, and leads to frustration. But often the search engine algorithms include what I meant, rather than what I asked for. ;’)
That’s not to say that the FR search doesn’t sometimes turn it up, but more than likely it will yield quite old results, while not showing the brand new ones. Probably due to the index system used.
BTW, I really loved this -- "foreign ministry calls for calm". Heh...