Google's indexing process is not known to be a very reliable or consistent alternative since they could change the content of their index day by day and also Google spiders often only parts of a forum or site. It's a very incomplete search method for forums and I'd be surprised if everything would be found with it especially when time goes by.Kevin Solway wrote: However, the old posts should be indexed along with the new ones, with regard to the forum's own search function, so I'll see what I can do.
phpBB version 3 has two different search engines available, one of its own (default) and one mysql option that might be more heavy on the server but I'm not sure about the issues. I do know there's under phpBB admin panel section maintenance an option to delete and re-create search indexes. What appears to happen now is that the index is only added to after writing a new post but was not created after importing the old database. Re-indexing might take a while though and slow the board down for a while, perhaps an hour or so.
If I'm reporting old news for Kevin then of course my apologies. It's just that I've played with this myself recently and discovered this behavior too.