new search terrible

By default every search now searches the whole site even if you are viewing a subcategory, in particular, every life search started in the huge, in-your-face Ask a Question field.

You have to use the search field in the top right corner, start your search, which will search globally, and once the results are in you can restrict it via the 'More Options' button.

But these things happen with public betas, obvious features are not implemented yet (like restricting the search to the category if a category is selected). Or things like having two search fields that do different things (both do a global life search but one shows the results directly below, the other in a jittery pop-up, but only the latter allows for a refinement, and the former allows to turn your question into a post). Which just shows again that this site has been slapped together using different elements without coming up with a congruent and consistent way to present all the features.

Or Apple seriously believes that people are in their majority too stupid to select the right category (for the subgroup which has made the effort to select a category) and thus a global search will provide better results.

Leave the OS version out of the search terms and put 10.6 into the 'Restrict to a Community, Project or Group' field, and you'll get these results.

Also see: https://discussions.apple.com/search-tips.jspa

Direct link to Search page: https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa

(or just click the blue Search button in the upper right of any page without entering any search terms into the field).

Tuttle, that all does not change the fact navigating to a category/subforum does not automatically put the subforum into the 'Restrict to a Community' field. A common behaviour is that people navigate to a category, have a brief look whether anything might fits their question and if not start a search. With the new system they have to 'enter' the category twice, once for navigating to it and second for searching in it.

And there is no technical or user interface design reason for this except 'we have not got around to implementing it' or 'we actually think most users are better of searching the whole site'.

It's actually very easy. You can refine right in the the live search. At top of the window there is a Show: All | Current Community. If you click on the current community, it will narrow the search. With that selected, if you click on more results, it automatically filters in the search results that are returned.

i am having trouble also using the new search, it brings up a lot of old entries, just tried it on this section

there is a discussion with the word widget in the title

I search for widget, when the pop up appears select this area only, the first 2 results are from 2006, and the discussion which is the 3rd one on the page doesnt appear

I have to agree. The search mechanism now confuses me. When I see some of those results pop up that I believe may relate to whet I'm looking for I often fail to notice that they are years old and I wind up going through them until I realize they're about old OSs or software versions and then have to go back and start again. I can understand that the intent was to improve the process but at least for me it makes me not want to bother and just start a new thread on an issue that may have already been discussed and possibly answered.

I have started using google to find the info now and narrowing it down to the last month, if nothing there change to look back further

searched for 'apple discussions widget' in google and it found the above entry straight away