For oh about the past 25 years, when people mention the idea of searching ifarchive.org , I’ve said “just use Google with site:ifarchive.org.” (Maybe I didn’t say that in 2001. But shortly thereafter.)
Once IFDB launched, I said “just use Google or IFDB.”
This has never been completely satisfactory, though. IFDB only covers games, not interpreters or development tools or articles. And Google is messy these days.
I now have a trial of an IF Archive search form:
https://search.ifarchive.org/search
(The domain will eventually change to search.ifarchive.org but I haven’t done that yet.) (EDIT: I did it; edited link above.) (EDIT: In fact just go to search.ifarchive.org, that’s easier.)
The search engine behind this is a Python library called Whoosh. It’s rather old but it seems to work fine.
Please give it a spin and let me know what you think.
(I haven’t put the search form on the front page yet. I want to give it a bit of road testing first, which is what this post is about. Also, I don’t have any clear idea how much server load this will cause.)