Nick (and others) please see here for details.
chesl73, the main problem is that people want to search for “universe report” or something like that. 
There are tens of thousands of posts with those two words in them. If you expand that to topics, you will likely get hits on a third of the content on the board. The ‘stop words’ were intended to (a) keep our search index smaller / more managable, and (b) keep users from making searches that would end up be useless anyway.
We have added many of the stopwords back into the index. We have also added a “full text” index to see how that impacts the board. After a month or two we will try to get a full text search page out for beta testing. The advantages of using the fulltext index are we can do a phrase search, you can set certain words as more or less important in your search, and you can sort things by relevance. The restrictions are you can only search by post (not topic) and the search overhead is much higher. All trade-offs to consider.
Dave Rathbun 
(BOB member since 2002-06-06)