http://www.ozzu.com/search.php

The past week or so I have gotten a different search page here than previously. Now I get a single search text box with radio button options 'Web' and 'www.ozzu.com'. The regular phpbb search where you had options like searching by username and forum is no longer there for me. I cleared my temp files and no change.

Did I miss something? I like the phpbb search better.

Yeah, it would appear BWM has changed that recently.

I agree that the older original search was better. I'm sure there are some good reasons behind the changes though

guess:
the phpbb search is too cpu/mysql intensive? having a search for usename or forcing google to do it would releive the bulk of the searching from ozzu's servers

Nucleo - that's exactly correct. It was done exactly for that reason, to improve the board efficiency. The Google search for OZZU works very well in place off the old way and I've already noticed significant performance improvements.

Lionking - There should be two search boxes on that search page, one still lets you search by username. Please let me know if you are not seeing that box.

In the last week I did change the search page. The amount of records in Ozzu is just getting too big and phpbb indexing and searching functions are just putting too much of a load on the server. I believe one of the biggest reasons for any lag and long posting times on ozzu was directly related to this.

So the reason it was removed was to give Ozzu a good performance increase. Of course this comes at the cost of not having the built in PHPBB search utility anymore, but overall I think it is worth it. The Google search engine should be able to do almost as good of a job (if not better) at finding threads, and by leaving Google to do the searching you should actually notice Ozzu being faster now. You will really notice this when you post, it should be quick unlike before. Editing and deleting of posts in the past could take a long time to process as well. Now it should be very quick.

I know for some this might take some getting used to, but removing the PHPBB search was inevitable.

I may still bring back some sort of PHPBB search in the future, but it would be much reduced in its capabilities. One idea is to only index the topic titles, instead of the complete post content. This would really limit the ability of the searching though.

Definately seen a preformance increase over here, specially with editing.

Handy topic to read http://www.ozzu.com/google-seo/google-tricks-t340.html

Yes it is there but offers no benefit over clicking a username then 'Find all posts by {username}'. It was so very useful to be able to search a certain usernames posts for keywords, but you specify why you did that in the rest of your post.

Yeah, lionking, but it was really killing the board. You have no idea how huge that search table is, especially on a board the size of OZZU's. There's actually two tables involved. I miss the old search too, but I definitely think Bigweb made the best choice on this one.