Is there an easy way to search for old threads? I am having difficulty finding the old "girls holding pies" threads. There are at least two of them. These are some of my favorites, and I wanted to revisit them. Any help would be appreciated.

https://umd.net/forums/girls-holding-pies-thread

Don't get me started on searches-- This is not a UMD complaint but a general one. Boolean searching was so much more efficient and produced better results, but it was apparently too complicated. Now all search engines, etc. are dumbed down to be almost useless

I find the best way to search for things on most sites is ignore any built-in search and just use the power of Google. If you open a Google tab and enter this in the search box:

site:umd.net "girls holding pies"

That tells it to only return results from umd.net and to return everything with the phrase "girls holding pies" (the quote marks make it search for the whole phrase instead of individual words - as you can imagine searching for just "pies" on the UMD will return a ridiculous number of results.

This is the result of the search above:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aumd.net+%22girls+holding+pies%22

And no, definitely not just a UMD issue, in fact as sites-own searches go the UMD one is fairly good, the one that really gets my goat is the BBC News site, which despite presumably having an entire dev team at its disposal has the most useless search function in the history of useless search functions - it's Google every single time to find specific news items there.

Ridiculous, yes. But ever so sublime!

Holding

Your stuff is great. Please post more of it!

From a set I did.

One of my biggest complaints about search!! Used to be you could craft a search very precisely and get pretty much exactly what you asked for. Now, they assume that anyone searching is an idiot, make guesses and assumptions from what you entered, and end up giving you mostly entirely irrelevant results. Goddamit, I know what I want - give me what I asked for - no more, no less. Don't look for synonyms or similar things or assume I can't spell and autocorrect my search.

And when you try to use Google's more obscure search features, they keep giving you captcha challenges, repeatedly, thinking you must be a malicious bot or something because you are smart enough to know what you are doing.

Problem is, some sites are set up to be quite difficult to Google. Facebook, for example. Search for something via Google and you get only a fraction of results. Use Facebook's own search function and you can find tons of additional things - BUT, their search is klutzy and not super-intuitive. Often, you'll get hundreds of things that have absolutely NO relation to your search terms - not even close. And every so often they suddenly change the algorithms or whatever, and you suddenly have the same search you do on a regular basis return completely different results. I've had to spend inordinate amounts of time experimenting to figure out how the thing works. (Like, if you search the same exact words in a different order, you get different results!)

Another example is Instagram. There is no easy way to search IG - much of it is invisible to Google, and their own search does not even allow multiple terms or hashtags in one search, rendering it largely useless. AND they only go back so many months - stuff posted even a few years back that is still there (for instance, if you are looking at a specific user's history you can find everything they have posted) but the oldest entries no longer come up in a search.

Search engines are now engineered to provide minimal basic results to ignorant users. For the serious researcher, they are worthless.