Eng:Why don't items show up in a search?

The Scratch Website uses a Google custom search engine; as this engine takes up to a few days to add new pages, it consequently does not show new items, such as new Scratchers or projects. All of these should show up in at most a week.



Others
For some parts of the site, there is an alternative to the Google search.

Advanced Search
There used to be a Google-independent beta "advanced search" here that allowed users to search for projects by a variety of factors including post date, love-its, sprites, scripts, and many others. Recently uploaded projects appeared in this search immediately.

It only searched projects, though it was wanted for galleries too.

Interestingly, the page for the search was replaced by a MySQL error page. The reason for this is unknown. More recently, it appears to be a broken copy of Clutter.

You can run an advanced search from the Google website itself from here. Notice how the site/domain field is filled in as scratch.mit.edu. This can be changed to wiki.scratch.mit.edu to search for Wiki pages

Using the Google website
It is possible to use the Google website to search for projects more accurately than the custom search provided.

To do so, enter "site:scratch.mit.edu " then your search term. Specific parts of the website can also be searched, for example:

Scratch provided search
The search bar was changed to a Google custom search during Hour of Code because of all the new users that it would generate. However, although the Scratch Team said that the search would be changed back, it has not yet been.

Complaints
Sometimes, new users ask on the forums why their user profiles do not show up in the search engine. Also, sometimes the search engine does not index new pages for a long time.