Currently, the contents of Alim.org are, for the most part, just primary source texts. While there is a considerable amount of other content, the overwhelming majority is still Quran and Hadith. Hence, search queries that are topical in nature will not yield many results.
You have to keep in mind that the word(s) you are searching for actually have to be in the text. If you put in many words, by default all of them have to be in the text. You can also put OR between each word if you want to show results with any (but not necessarily all) of the words. So when constructing an effective search query, you have to think “what unique word will be in the texts that I am looking for” and construct your query accordingly. Note that this is markedly different than thinking “what is the topic I am searching for” which is a more typical query that you would enter in a search engine like Google.
Another option you have is to visit the topical index section for Quran and Hadith and look for your subject of inquiry there. This is the closest thing we currently have to grouping content in a topical nature. We have recently introduced tagging as another means of grouping content by topic. Once we officially go live and, insha’allah, have a sizeable user presence and considerable activity, we should see the number of tags increase and eventually become a user generated index. This would effectively facilitate a topical search.
Eventually we would like to add a section to allow users to upload articles and other content. Furthermore, we are hoping users will utilize the commenting functionality to add more content attached to the primary source texts. Much of this type of content, we expect, will be topical in nature. Again, once the site goes live and we get more users we hope this will happen in a natural way.