Namaste Sarabhanga.
The main difficulty in the current HDF Search facility is that it is not 'acute' as Nuno puts it. I think it is required to be more precise and indicate the exact page in a thread in its results if not the specific post in that page where the search string appears.
For example, in the Advanced Search page, I typed the keyword 'Nadinatha', with the default 'extreme' conditions of searching: entire posts, zero or more replies, any date and search in Child forums. The search, however, throws up no matches!
However, if I type 'Nandikeshvara Kashika' as the keyword, two threads pop up as the search results:
Learning Sanskrit by Interaction at HDFpuri ( 1 2)
Siva Sutras ( 1 2 3 ... Last Page)
As you notice here, each thread has multiple pages, and I have no idea in which page(s) the keyword appears. So I need to open the thread and manually search each page, many times using the browser's page search facility. This is tedious when a thread runs to several pages.
As against this type of results, would it not be far more convenient if the results pop up with the keywords in brief text under the thread/post titles as with the case of a Google search?
If providing the Google Search facility in HDF would slow it down and expose the Website to potential risks, we may perhaps think about a Master Index facility with the keywords of concepts, names and quote texts, etc. Now that HDF has become a valuable repository of Hindu texts, there is acute need to make it an efficient library of information, specially to the members for referencing and quoting in their posts.
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