I wanted to find a thread that I started, called bookmarking. I went to, "search garden.org"and entered "bookmarking". There were a few results from the forums, and mine wasn't one of them. By it's name, it should've been the first if not the only one on the list.
Just a minute ago, I used the search bar and put in "site talk". I would think the first thing that should come up would be a link to the site talk forum. Wouldn't that make sense? It's not only not first: it's not there. So what's the purpose of the search feature?

Mike, here you go: The thread "Bookmarking" in Site Talk forum

To find it, I went to your profile page and clicked on View posts by m33jones2.

Thanks. I could find it, but I thought it might be a little quicker doing the search. I'm just wondering why the search doesn't work like it should. I tried, "tomato chat thread", and the thread that had those exact words in that exact order was number 5 on the list.
What kind of rules does that thing go by?

I never have much luck searching for anything within the forums. I chalk it up to operator-error, and I'm not all that interested in learning new tricks, so I don't spend much time trying. I have much better luck within the database, which is where I spend most of my time. (Sorry, not much help with your question.)

The search feature matches the contents of posts and articles, although I would have thought it should match the titles as well. The forum results are ordered by how recent they are.

@dave, should matching forum thread titles also be in the search results? I just tried Mike's original search and the thread doesn't appear.

If you put in the exact title or exact words in the title of any forum or thread or article or anything, that should come up before anything else. The closest match should be first, instead of a more recent less relevant result.
Or maybe I just think differently, but the way it is doesn't make any sense to me.

Mike — It doesn't make sense to me either. I tried a couple of your examples. Didn't have much luck.

I do find this to be curious. When I did a search for 'Tomato Chat Thread', unlike your result, I didn't find it to be number 5 on the list. In fact it was so far down that I almost quit looking. Since I didn't know whether to use quotation marks, I tried the search with and without them. Same result.

When I tried searching for 'Bookmarking', I ended up finding a question I asked about a year ago that was not related to bookmarking and also had never been answered. In fact I'd been looking for that question just the other day.