Like many others, I was considerably relieved when Max recently announced that he had re-indexed the search engine to include threads from the last few years. To begin with it seemed to be working admirably, but in the last few days it has become obvious that a lot of stuff that used to be indexed is no longer found. Either something has gone badly wrong or I was mistaken to think that it had been working properly; I've been out of circulation for a few weeks, after all.

Poor VT is quite champing at the bit to post her lyric transcriptions (not too many at once, please; do take it slowly) but so far half of her new threads duplicate what is already here. We do need to avoid unnecessary repetition, as it just confuses people and adds to the enormous amount of redundant material already indexed, thus making future indexing harder, more unwieldy and more prone to future problems.

With luck this is something that Max will be able to fix now he's aware of it. Meanwhile, the best means of searching the forum is to use the search terms you'd normally use (a key phrase is often better than what you think the title of a song might be, but try several possibilities for best results) but run them through the advanced search function at Google combined with the word 'mudcat'. Not infallible, but a lot more reliable than what we have onsite at the moment.