[John Robinson]

Try searching for the FULL title of this thread by the default relevance ordering and you'll see that the topic has previously been discussed.

The search engine works best if you put as many related words in the field, including full titles (real or imagined--it doesn't need exactly titles.) It will fail miserably if you search for only one or two words. The more the merrier.

I'm positive people do not realize this is a feature of the search engine. Each time I've seen a duplicate post, I've searched for the FULL title and found the first posting of the thread almost always as the first result.

[fishtank]

OK, I will try it as you say.

But is it possible to build a switch in the preferences section for each user?

Why have the two options if one of them is perfect?

[mrsmith]

The titles (headlines) are changed by the different news companies.
The best way to avoid dupe posts is to serch recently for a few keywords.

I've slways thought you had "relevence" as the default for the benefit of newbies and lurkers who were looking for information about a subject.
People who post should already know how to search for dupes IMHO.

[Hipixs]

I'm positive people do not realize this is a feature of the search engine. Each time I've seen a duplicate post, I've searched for the FULL title and found the first posting of the thread almost always as the first result.

If one does a search for "DoD News Briefing - Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers" their are multiple hits and the latest briefing [10/02/03] does not show up until the 20th entry.

[Some hope remaining.]

My most common search is for an article I remember reading recently but can only remember maybe one key word that was probably in the title. Relevance search always finds articles that are too old and the first thing I do is switch to time ordered and search again.

Obviously you can set it up how you want but, IMO, it leads to extra load on the servers.

I spent some time just the other day trying to find a way to change this in my preferences but of course it's not there.