When I was in highschool, they made me take a computer class. I almost wound up being expelled over that ordeal, but that's a different story. Anyways, for the sake of a demonstration they picked a fairly generic search field (something like 'snowboarding') and made us search for it in all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) to see what the results were. Every engine is searching the same data - yet they all produced different results. Yahoo would typically produce about eleventybillion more results than google - but google typically produced results that actually MET your criteria as it understood keywords and offers some form of spam filtering.
So yeah, a search engine can seem entirely the same but produce very different results.
Those ones search data that might as well be infinite. They need a more complicated engine than our little ol' site and that complication will lead different engines down different paths. Plus never underestimate the power of the almighty dollar. Some of the matches that show up on the first page are there for a reason (and usually are worthless). :fs1:
Our engine seems to be relatively simple and straightforward. It find all the posts that match your criteria, then displays them in reverse-chronological order. Searching can be more art than science sometimes. It takes practice to be efficient. And that's one of the reasons why I tend to encourage new members to just ask their questions.
A tip for everyone: check the box to display "topics" rather than individual posts. You'll get fewer repeat results. :thumbsup: