[martin_fierro]

"In someone's ear."

[martin_fierro]

Ping

[jdm]

"This plugin might be useful for searching the bodies of past FR threads, not just the titles."

Bears repeating.

If I had a nickel for every time I, myself, or someone else needed to find an old, archived article on FR using keywords from the story itself, I'd have a few bucks by now.

Let me look into this. I'm not the biggest techy out there, by a long shot, but judging from the screen, requirements, looks quite doable fairly readily.

[willieroe]

http://www.google.com/swr?q=site:freerepublic.com&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&as_qdr=all&swrnum=2050000

Add this page to your Favorites, name it "Free Republic Google Search" - or are you looking for something more complex?

[Brett66]

I'd just like the search feature on FR to be enhanced to be more like Google. For example, if I type in "NASA" in the search field, I won't get any article that has "NASA's" in the title. That's one reason there are so many duplicate threads.

[TomGuy]

Google used to be very good for locating older FR articles.

However, I think FR now has a cgi file or similar script that prohibits Google from being able to 'index' or 'search' FR articles that are more than a few days old.

This is a detriment to FR.

Too many good threads get lost after a short while. If one tries to relocate an old thread, that becomes a difficult task, unless one remembers a specific bookmark link or keyword.

The current FR search requires that any search be more than 3 characters. That makes searching for FBI, CIA, CBS, NBC, CNN, GOP, etc., useless.

[xcamel]

Try something like this also:

http://alltheweb.com/search?advanced=1&cat=web&jsact=&type=all&q=site%3Awww.freerepublic.com&itag=crv&_stype=adv&_b_query=eschelon+NEAR+clinton

[HAL9000]

I've been thinking about a customized web browser for FR. The motivation for that was to have a better way to post articles, but it could have a built-in FR search engine too.

It could be an open-source project hosted on SourceForge, based on WebKit.

[martin_fierro]

Firefox now has on its "Search Engine AddOns" page a link to something called "Rollyo: Roll Your Own Firefox Search Engine! Create a personal search engine that provides relevant results from a hand selected list of sites".

When used with "http://www.freerepublic.com", this Rollyo feature comes closest to what I was originally inquiring about in this thread.

It can create a search button specifically for searching FR when using the Firefox browser. Google is not the search engine used (Rollyo is), but it seems to work pretty well!