In general, I'd like it to be easier to search on this site.
Strongly seconded.
Example: A search for "the mathematicians have already covered this" failed to turn up this comment
I finally found it by laboriously browsing through the particular user's overview: that's right, clicking "Next", over and over and over. (All the while getting distracted into reading numerous old threads....)
So, there is more than one way in which room for improvement exists in this area.
(I'd also like to be able to easily retrieve old PMs, which are buried in one's inbox among all the numerous comment replies one has received in the meantime.)
The search feature is using Google to search Less Wrong pages. It seems to trip up over the fact the same data is included in several different pages, a comment shows up on the article page, permalinks to the comment and comments nearby in the tree, recent comment lists, and the authors comment and combined history.
It would be nice to have a search feature that searched on the database rather than the website, using an algorithm that understands the structure of the data, and could return the best link to show the data it finds, just the link to the comment or article. This however would require writing search functionality rather than using a tool freely provided by Google.
When I click on a LW member's page, I get a list of all his/her posts and comments, in reverse chronological order. Sometimes there are a lot of these. It would be nice to be able to see just the top-level posts by a given user. Is this at all feasible to accomplish? Comment if you would (or wouldn't) like such a feature.