It's funny what shows up on search engines ... google your username with site:tanga.com (i.e., cwarrior site:tanga.com) and you'll get a ton of hits. I get 48,600 hits on that ... it's mostly comments and such, but when google spiders tanga, it gets a lot of stuff that it shouldn't. There are ways to prevent google (and others) from doing that, but it isn't configured here. In my opinion, this should be fixed. It's minor, but it's not industry standard. I can do the same search on several other sites I frequent and the google trick doesn't work there.

Now, I know that's not the tanga search you're asking for ... you could play around with goog;e and see if using the site parameter helps you find the kind of stuff you want, but ultimately a search engine for tanga on tanga would be really nice and the suggestion has been made before by others.

One of the things that really help search engines are meta tags and tanga doesn't have that. I'm sure if tanga's designers were to start over from scratch they'd add this feature, but essentially the meta tags are keywords that describe page contents. Ideally, puzzle creators could add a few tags like 'movies, sports, cryptography' to describe the puzzle. That would make searching much easier, but to go back and edit thousands of puzzles would be a pain in the tookus. I doubt we'll ever get that level of functionality around here, but it is technically possible.

Just searching on answers is also possible and wouldn't be that tough to code that functionality. Perhaps there's fear it would be abused/hacked to get answers for unsolved puzzles, but I'm sure it could be coded properly to avoid that. Essentially, answers are in tables and writing SQL searches for this purpose isn't that tough. I'm not sure if this would be useful enough to warrant the investment.

In summary, google does some of what your asking, but I wish it didn't. A real powerful search is possible, but probably too work intensive. A less powerful search tool is also possible, but might be too limited to get much use. Especially with tanga on the "For Sale" block, I don't think we'll see anything like this any time soon

Note: My comments are my own and in no way representing tanga.

hey cwarrior,

thanks for your input. at least in a minimal way the google search feature will probably solve some of my issues. what i really wanted from a search engine is just to be able to avoid duplicating other puzzles already done on tanga, especially cryptos. thanks again though, and i'm sure you are right that nothing will come of it anytime soon.