is an explanation of the search engine. I have had terrible luck using the search function, resulting in about 50% of my submissions being dupes without my realizing it.

YES I SEARCH. I use what I assume are likely tags, and not-so-likely tags. However, the dupes often have the very tags and/or titles I myself used! Now, Obviously I am doing something wrong as per the search engine but not really knowinbg how it searches and how it uses tags, my only education will be trial and error. As someone pointed out, sift is MUCH bigger now and trial and error is not a good way to educate the masses.

I realize the code warriors are busy with more interesting things but honestly this is starting to get on my nerves: I submitted a dupe of http://www.videosift.com/video/How-We-Met and http://www.videosift.com/video/Web-20-The-Machine-is-Using-Us-very-cool-class-outline (as examples) and yet three searches (for each) with differnt tags netted NO evidence of those vids. I'm not stupid nor am I some kinda intarwebby n00b; I was a code warrior myself back in the days of COBOL. If I just had some inkling of how the search engine works (logic? logic modifiers? exact terms? stubs?) I am sure I could do much better and stop wasting the more seasoned sifters time with tracking down my dupes.

Please... all I want for christmas is no more dupes.