Now, I'd love your help, but first please read this: I'm a computer professional too, so the problem is not that I haven't read the tips, or don't know how to build a query. I'm trying to figure out if there are actually deficiencies in the search engine that need to either be fixed, or at least better advertized.

Now please understand, I eventually found the posts below manually, by going through the numbered pages. Then I went back to the search page to try to experiment & hopefully figure out why I never have any luck with it, and tried several different searches based on text that I already knew to be in the posts.

<a href=http://www.a4.org/forum/m/s4/15312.phtml>S4 Antenna installation pics</a>
<a href=http://www.a4.org/forum/m/s4/15401.phtml>Some answers (more)</a>

At the time of this writing, these were on page 5 of the S4 forum. I was unable to find them with any of the following queris, which are based the posts subjects & text contained within them. These queries were all executed specifying the S4 forum, written in any language, and modified in 30 days.

1) "In between headliner" (phrase in 1st post)
2) "headliner and glass" (two words in 1st post)
3) "Some answers" (title of 1st post)
4) "S4 Antenna installation pics" (title of 2nd post)
5) "wanting to complete the cell phone installation" (phrase in 2nd post)
6) antenna

#1 came back with 25 hits, all of which contain the word "headliner" but none of the ones I checked contain "between", much less the whole phrase. The search tips page says to find an exact phrase, just type it. It doesn't specify any special delimiters.

#2 came back with 1 hit, which a) did not appear to contain any of the search phrase, and b) furthermore, the hit it came back linked simply to page 4 of the S4 forum (not any specific post) which today contains messages from around Nov 23, but the abstract quoted was dated 10/27/99. Needless to say, the message referred to by the abstract was nowhere to be found on page 4 of the S4 forum. I honestly don't know if the post in question acutally matches the query b/c I have no idea how to find it. The post I'm looking for <b>definitely</b> matches the query - why wasn't it found? Why did this query refer me to page 4 of the S4 forum?

#3 came back w/ 58 matches, some of which actually contained the phrase in the query, but the post I was looking for <b>was not</b> in the list.

#4 came back with "no documents found." This is the exact subject for crying out loud!
There doesn't seem to be a FAQ about searching, only the tips page.

#5 no documents found

#6 came back w/ several documents in September & even August, but did not find the above post.

I'd really appreciate explanations for any of these anomalies, and if someone can show me a search string that acually finds either of the above posts, I'd very much like to see it.