I think you can search just the forum you're reading in, if you notice and select the drop down choice in the gray box that appears while you're typing. Or, it seems to work for me that way. For example, I'm reading in Kitchens, and I type "week" in the search box. While I'm typing it, a drop down box appears right under the search box, giving me the options to search in Kitchens, or Advice, Photos, Find a Pro, etc. When I search for "week" just in the Kitchens forum, I get a pretty clean list of your good threads, CEFreeman. Dunno if this helps?

The photo issue was due to THAT site - had nothing at all to do with Houzz or GW. And I seriously doubt any major changes are going to be happening to the GW side of things or that it's going to be "dumped"......all the garden forums are still very active and functioning as normal. The 'search' function on Houzz still works for me.......but you do need to be in the forum where the original thread was posted. I can't remember if that is any different than it always has been, tho. If you can't remember what forum, then I agree doing a Google search is probably faster and more efficient. As an aside, the conversational forums really do not have a topic they focus on, compared to the gardening forums or most of the home forums so it does make it more difficult to locate old threads if you are not absolutely certain which forum they were posted to originally. For example, if I was hunting for an old thread about hydrangeas, I'd look in the Hydrangea forum first. But I would not necessarily have though to look in the Harvest forum for a thread on vanilla..........just saying :-))

Well, I had to restore default Chrome settings this morning, and now when I try to get here the way I always have, by googling That Home Site, now I'm getting only "the dark side". I had to go into my activity and click on this page to get to this familiar setting. So, today's problem has something to do with my settings change, but Carolb, yesterday's issue was nothing I did, because I didn't change anything or do anything differently, and one minute I couldn't access search info, and then later after posting my lament- pouf- I could. These issues and roadblocks are becoming tiresome, but I don't want to leave yet because I hate to admit - how accustom -ok- addicted I am to "GW" and all the familiar posters. And frankly I am going to be really sad if GW as I knew it continues to slowly fade away....

Agree, the search feature is ineffective. I think that is contributing to why the posts /threads seem so haphazard and random and redundant. In the old days, you could really put in a term in the search feature which would work to return threads from even years ago (and certainly weeks or months ago) and you could bring them back to life. Now not at all so the value of the forums has really declined. I too wish the search feature could work. It's not you.