I just decided to find out how many Sierra Laser editions we have, so punched Laser into the search box, unticked everything else and ticked extra info. Result - a few Capris and Escorts but apparently no Sierras - not even the 1.6 Laser II I'd just posted. So I rearranged that one to Laser II 1.6 and did the search again and it came up. I then looked through the Sierra listing, found a couple more Lasers and rearranged them so there is now a handful of them which should appear.

So searching extra info seems to be determined by how we order the words. If it is more likely that people would search for Sierra Laser than Sierra 1.6 (and the countless comparable examples), should we have a habit of putting trim first and engine size last? (If anyone is confused by this - try searching as I did for just Laser which now gives 16 results mixing Capri, Escort & Sierra, then try 1.6 Laser - just 3 results - 1 Capri and 2 Escorts each of which is new and not found in the previous 16).

Can the new software be designed to search for terms across the extra info wherever they occur, rather than just the first term as now?

The alternative is to make Laser a model variant in each case. I can imagine people throwing up their hands in horror at this (where will it end? how many Sierra models would we end up with if taken to extremes with all the L, LX, GLS, Ghia, XR4i, XR4x4 etc, etc permutations?). But it might be worth thinking about relaxing our inhibitions about creating more model variants to some extent (which can be debated how far and in what circumstances) so that we improve the (re)searching ability. And even benefit our own IDing - I wanted to check my Sierra Laser against others, but apparently there were none. But after farting about in the bowels of the Sierra lists I realised that there were 2 different Laser editions in 84 and then 86 (stop snoring at the back) which we had not separated before but which I could confirm from checking against other sources now I knew what to look for.

Yes that's what got me the batch of 16. Now try the same boxes with "1.6 Laser" and compare the results .... 3 totally new discoveries.

How I work is by drawing up a certain model and then selecting view as list and then working through it. It's not great but IMO it's better than the way suggested in the thread where you end up with Chrysler Lasers etc.

Handling of models will be much improved in the next version of the site, so changes won't be made in the current one on that subject I think.

As Owlman suggested, you can find them currently. I do not see which one you would find by searching "1.6 Laser" that you can't find by searching just "Laster" if you chose "contains" instead of "starts with".

Oops - I didn't spot the "contains" switch. I have that sinking feeling that I might have been wasting everyone's time -