The Free Republic search function is seriously damaged, compared to the way it used to be.
I searched "Islamic" in the Advanced search page, using the "quick," "match any word" and by "order by post time" settings It returned about 20 hits, from 3/01 to 3/13.
As I recall, a single page used to return a lot more hits than than -- I have my preferances set to 250 articles per page. Further, only 20 hits on the word "Islamic" for a two weeks worth of posting seems too few.
At the bottom of the page I think there used to be a link for "find additional results," which would bring up several new pages of recent hits. But that's been changed to "Click to search older articles ... " When you click on it, it returns the same amount of articles from the same time frame -- 3/01 - 3/13. In other words, the "archive" setting is the same as the "recent" setting.
I seem to recall that it returned many more hits and went much deeper into the archive.
Note to Mods: Is anyone working on this?
I have noticed that, too. I've not been here too long, but it seems to me that this is a fairly new issue, within the last 90 days or so.
I just did a search about 15 minutes ago and ran into the same problem. I've gotten a few more hits when I use the google advanced search and confine the results to the freerepublic site. I MISS the old search function. There are all these great articles that are inaccessible now (sigh).