We are installing a greatly improved site search for our forums, and the site will be unavailable starting at 3AM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2011. We expect the outage to last about two hours.
The benefit will be a faster, more thorough search system for our forums. Sorry for the inconvenience!
As a reminder, there are two primary ways to search the forums:
**1) CC Search/Advanced Search. ** Our default system searches all of CC’s threads. Normally, results are presented in order of most recent activity. You can (using the advanced function) search for posts by a particular member, in a specific forum, or in a date range. You can also change the sort order or display only POSTS containing your keyword.
2) Google Search. While it has fewer options, Google has stored a large portion of CC’s content and can deliver useful results under many conditions. Google handles complex query structures (e.g., exact phrases, AND/OR logic, etc.) and vague queries that would match many thousands of threads (e.g., “harvard”) on CC.
We also have a “tag” search, but this relies on members to correctly assign tags to their threads. Since these tags are human-edited, give this a try if the other two search methods don’t yield what you want.
The contextual search (magnifying glass) is a very minor aspect of the update. I can speak with the vendor to determine if it is something we can disable. Can you explain what makes it an undesirable feature so that I can pass this on to the vendor?
Just a personal preference. Sometimes I highlight as I read and then I accidentally click on it. Pretty much the same reason I disabled the “accelerators” when I used Internet Explorer: I don’t have any use for it, and I just find it somewhat obstructive.
Hmm I have AdBlock for Google Chrome, but I couldn’t get the magnifying glass to go away, only the search popup from when you click on the magnifying glass. I’m really starting to hate that thing…
