How do I search for something with a common name?

[tom]

I will use as an example, my recent (re)interest in a French Louisiana. I tried today to look up "Louisiana" and got 200 hits, only one of which was obviously what I wanted (and that was the thread I started). It only went back to Feb 27. I know there are relevant threads earlier than that, but when I try searching on phrases, I get "The website cannot display the page".
So if I am looking for, for example, TLs where the American colonies split up after winning independence, how do I do this using Search?

[Beedok]

Try going strait to the section you're after and looking manually. That's what I do.

[tom]

So for my examples, you go to the Pre-1900 sub-forum and page through 28,920 threads?

[Beedok]

Originally Posted by tom

So for my examples, you go to the Pre-1900 sub-forum and page through 28,920 threads?

Well I tend to give up after a couple of pages.

[January First-of-May]

For French Louisiana in particular, I can only give three versions of advice:
1) Search for "Louisiana" in Pre-1900 specifically. It's not perfect but it's better than searching all over the forum (e.g. it's somewhat less likely to get you discussions of Louisiana the state).
2) Search for "Louisiane" - the actual French spelling. You won't get many hits that way, of course, but of the few you do get most should be on-topic.
3) Wait till the search function stabilizes (IIRC it sometimes does) and search for both words (i.e. "French Louisiana").

Another general advice: if you're reasonably sure that the topic you're searching for is in either Pre- or Post-1900, just use Google (it's reasonably easy to focus the results on this site only).

I don't have an idea what the search terms should be for a TL about America splitting up after independence, even if there could be several of them, so I can't really help for that particular topic.