I understand your frustrations and I believe I know what the people want and am the right person to help those people on Day One.

Oops, been watching too many primary debates

Seriously though, I just want to step in here and hopefully relieve a bit of the anxiety and clear up a few points.

The new search isn't yet a finished product (actually, I would go so far as to say nothing on the Internet is ever a finished product, but I digress). Kevin Hayes acknowledged in this post that this is a preliminary version of the new search, and that an improved version should be out next week.

As all of you likely are aware, the site has been experiencing some "performance" issues over the past two or three weeks. What Kevin and his team found was that these were at least partly caused by the load the original search feature placed on the system. The beta search was being developed to alleviate this problem.

Because the slowness of the site was becoming such a problem, it was decided to roll out the new search sooner than originally planned to help speed up the site as a whole, with the full understanding that the new search wasn't yet fully developed, but would be soon.

I understand this explanation won't immediately improve the new search option, but just want everyone to be aware that this is a temporary resolution and there is every intention to build out the new search quickly to include most, if not all, of the features that were available in the original search.

There is no intention to settle for an either/or result -- it won't be acceptable to anybody to either have a speedy site or a useful search. Both are a requirement, and that is the end goal here.

We do apologize for the frustrations this is causing, and you can be assured the team is working as hard as they can to get this worked out.

Thanks for your feedback all ^