Hey all, I know that searching the Café can be a bit challenging... or, at least it was last time I tried, as we're limited to searching one 'room' at a time (I'm only assuming that's still the case -- but even if it isn't, what follows is still good advice). I really love using the Café to do research on props & effects I'm thinking of buying, to get advice on questions I have, etc... and since it was tough to do, I started using a little-known trick within Google to better search the Café. I thought I'd take this moment to share it with you all.

If you have a specific search phrase in mind, and want to be able to search the entire Café for it, just go to Google, type in your search phrase, and at the end of your phrase, hit the space-bar and type "site:themagiccafe.com" (without the quotes). This limits the Google search to a single site, and brings back all results from that site. The only things it searches through are the forums that are publicly viewable... I haven't seen any 'downstairs' links yet. Not sure how that'll change once I gain access to them. (I spend way more time here reading than I do posting.)

For example, earlier today I was wondering, 'besides the classic sponge balls, what are some other good walk-around tricks for kids?' So I went to Google and searched "best walk around tricks for kids site:themagiccafe.com". The first few results gave me exactly what I needed to see. In fact, as I thought about how perfectly it worked, I was inspired to write this very post. So, you're welcome.

I hope this is helpful to some of you.

Cheers,
Leland

PS - I don't know if this is the best location to post this, but I figured that people who were having trouble with searching the Café might come here to air their grievances, so this is where I decided to put it. Steve, et al: if you feel it belongs elsewhere, feel free to relocate it. Also, it might be good to 'sticky' this post (but of course, I'm biased.)

The Café has moved to much larger servers and processors over the past few months and the search engine has been restored to its former glory. Your Google suggestion has been posted several times over the past year or two and is pretty widely known here. Welcome to the Café and enjoy your visits.