Is the mailing list search system broken?

[Philip J. Koenig]

> Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 11:16:10 -0400
> From: Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com>
> 
> stan wrote:
> > I can't seem to get any results, no matter what I search for.
> > 
> > Is this broken?
> 
> It certainly appears so ... your email is about the fifth complaining
> of this in the last 48 hours.
> 
> A few temporary workarounds are:
> 1) Go to the mailman home page for the particular list you want to
>     search and use that local search.  For example:
>     http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/
> 2) Use the advanced search on a search engine (such as google)


Long ago I stopped bothering much with the mailing list search 
function on the freebsd.org page because it was never good enough to 
find what I wanted, and the list archives were not readable by 
thread. (finally when they switched to Mailman, you can read archives 
by thread)

Same goes for some of the most common list archive sites - ie  
geocrawler - no threaded reading, and no search at all!

So personally I got in the habit of using groups.google.com when I 
want to do a search of the FreeBSD lists.  Their search facility is 
superior, I limit the newsgroups to "*freebsd*", and it will return 
results from the usenet groups which are gatewayed from the mailing 
lists (a small subset admittedly, but questions@ is one of them), and 
also the usenet groups which are separate from the mailing lists.



-- 
Philip J. Koenig                                       
pjklist at ekahuna.com
Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for 
the New Millenium