09.09.2008 9:56 am
Changes speed up STLtoday’s site search
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Friends:
We’ve made changes to the site search on STLtoday. We’d be happy to get your feedback on how it’s working for you.
Let’s face it: Previously, our site search was terrible. It was slow and, with a few exceptions, only included the stories that appeared on STLtoday. We knew it and certainly you knew it. Briefly, the changes tie our partnership with Yahoo into our site search, which means that a search of STLtoday will include more than the stories. It will include items on our blogs and forums, as well as video and other multimedia.
The search is also substantially faster.
Now, we’re hoping that it helps guide you to what you’re seeking faster. And remember: The more specific you can be with your search, the more effective it will be.
Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
Now would you please get rod of those really annoying popup windows!
Lazarus,
I had the same issue with those popup and flyout adds. Get Firefox 3.0 (free) and install the free add on called Ad Block Plus. Good buy ads.
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Right on Lazarus… What a stupid way to advertise… By angering your clientele…
Please get rid of those annoying pop-ups!
Now how about updating the news pages? I see the same stories weeks on end. This site is a second rate newspaper web site - at best.
I am not a speed reader, slow it down a little. I dont like your new format, I liked the first one better, but I am wasting my typing skills telling you, marie
I appreciate that the search is faster, however is there a way to sort the results by date, with the most recent stories displayed first?
This search is more useless for my purposes that the previous slow search feature. I can find no way to put the results in date order. Before a typical search would return 40 - 80 hits. This morning I got 1421 with no way to wade through all of that. When I came here doing a search it was for articles all this other “junk” is of no interest to me. The only advantage I can see to your new feature is that it is fast but totally unuseable for my purposes.
As slow and kludgy as it was, I have to say I like the old search feature better. It was the lesser of two evils. The “sort by date” feature was essential to my needs and it appears to be gone now. I end up with hundreds of irrelevent returns and now way to sort them. Granted, it is faster. Unfortunately the site search has gone from kludgy but usable to less kludgy but useless.
Although it’s been said, I just want to reiterate how frustrating it is that when running a search on the Web site, the results don’t appear in chronological order. Not only that, but when looking at the list of results, the dates don’t appear. So I get hundreds of results, and I have to click on each one to see if it was published today or five years ago? How annoying! My job requires that I run a search everyday, so I really hope that this will problem will be rectified soon. I would like my search results to appear in chronological order, and I would like to see the date of each article in my results, like it did with the old and better search engine.