Something is definitely non-optimal with the search capability on the this board.

Even when I only search one area and only search message titles, a search usually takes several minutes and sometimes much longer. I'm a computer professional, work with many other sites, and this one is by far the slowest. 500,000 postings should not take nearly this long to search.

Any others finding the same problem?

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I don't believe anyone else has reported this kind of delay. I have tested many different options and the longest response time was 35 seconds. The search in progress window indicates that it could take up to 2 minutes but none I have tested has taken that long. Could you give us an example of a search item that took longer than 2 minutes?

As I begin writing this message there are 10,446,336 keywords in the database.

Searching for "book" (and many people do, as one or another of their keywords) matched over 27,000 records and took about 25 seconds. A search for "palm" matched over 4,000 records and took about 15 seconds. Searching for both words ("any" of the words) matched 31,000 records and took about 45 seconds. Searching for both words ("all" of the words) returned 406 matches, and took about a minute.

"All words" searches have to get a list of post IDs for each word, then compare the lists to find common post IDs that have all the words, so that takes longer.

Searching through over 10 million keywords takes a while, to be sure. Unlike other search engines, one thing this search engine does *not* do is limit the matches that are returned. (The previous search engine used here is a prime example!) Searching multiple words in a single search will naturally take longer to complete. If another user has already begun a search before you started yours, your search will wait to run until the other person's search is complete. (That's a limitation of the database itself though.)

As suggested by Dave, if you post your keywords then we can test them out and see what's up.

Hope that helps!