Microcosm Feature Suggestions

bossman. will the search in mc be better? for example, searching for "meme" doesnt bring up the memes thread because it is plural, same for tattoo, project, etc.. would save me typing a lot of s's

Yes and no.

Yes because in the example you gave it works much much better. The new search uses natural language techniques.

Let me show you:
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=ride
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=rides
http://forum.islington.cc/search/?q=riding

Those three searches being back the same results. The system understands that the word is effectively the same. Though things will be re-ordered so that the best match is at the top.

But in some ways it's worse.

For example if you need to precisely match the word "riding" it's going to be much harder to do so.

Hashtags will be able to precisely match, but I can't find an example of people using that yet.

It's also not going to do as good a job on non-English languages. The ability to recognise language requires a language pack and knowledge that a comment is written in a particular language.

It's all complex... but for the vast majority of searches, it will be much better. And for the edge case of highly specific searches, it will be worse.