# Searching the TUG Website



## Makai Guy

The XenForo software on which our bulletin board runs includes a search facility.  (*Click here* for general BBS search instructions.)  This works by creating an index of all the hundreds of thousands of posts on the board, and indexes the words therein.  When you do a search, you're actually searching this index, rather than the raw posts themselves.

This is MUCH faster than searching the raw posts would be, but introduces additional limitations.  The index excludes words shorter than 4 letters in length to keep the index to a manageable size and acceptable response time.  In addition, it searches the BBS only, so it won't return results from other parts of the TUG website.

If you need to search for short terms, such as 3-letter resort abbreviations, or want to find things that may reside elsewhere on TUG than the bulletin board, you can use the *Google TUG Search Page* to perform your search.  Great pains have been taken to assure that Google has indexed the entire TUG site.

LIMITATIONS OF THE GOOGLE SEARCH

A search including extremely common terms, such as 'TUG' or 'resort' for instance, will provide so many returns that it will be useless.  

Google will return all items it finds, regardless of age, so it may return very old items that are long out of date.  Please check the dates of any BBS threads it returns before you add a reply.  In many cases, it may be better for you to just start a new thread rather than add a reply to an old, long dead one.
*Click here* to go to the Google TUG Search Form.

TO use GOOGLE directly to search ONLY the BBS:
Go to google.com and enter _site:tugbbs.com_ as your first search term​
*Other BBS Help Topics*​


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