Is there anyway to reduce the forced 30-second delay between searches? The message that currently appears is the following:

If you have an unsuccessful search and think of better search terms, you have to sit around for 30 seconds. Not that big of deal but that's a lot of FTing I'm probably missing!

On a side note, is 30-seconds some default or was there reasoning behind implementing the delay?

Yea, I was wondering the ratioale behind this as well.

I'd assume that the 30 second delay is to keep folks from driving up the load on the servers via repeated rapid-fire searches (which, IMHO, is a good thing).

Searching is resource intensive on the server and therefore there are some limitations placed on searches.

Hi John

Thanks for your response. I've found this a problem too, as I (and others) posted here.

I appreciate that searching uses up server resources, but is there any particularl reason for 30 seconds? Would it be possible to maybe trial a 15 second delay, and see if that results in a drop in performance of the site as a whole? Or maybe limit the number of searches to 10 in a five minute period? If there's some compromise solution that would be great, as very often having completed one search (which doesn't return the preferred result) you want to refine your search and run another right away.

I know this must seem like a tiny thing, but I would imagine if you added up the number people and the number of 30 second delays, it's probably a significant amount of the community's time...

Consider it a weather delay.

Dan and I have agreed to decrease the time to 15 seconds in the next day or so.

Well, I actually spelled 'search' wrong the first time when I looked for previous threads in this forum and then when I had to wait 30-seconds before another search, I thought it would be faster to just post a new thread.

Thanks so much for this. ^

Does search actually WORK?! I haven't bothered trying much lately cuz so many people said it didn't.

In fact, someone posted last Friday (4/16) that they couldn't find anything about a particular hotel, but I did a thorough review of that hotel, and the hotel name as the title in the thread & it was only in Jan 2004, but it didn't come up on search even though they were in the right forum, so I had to do it again (and did a much shorter review than the original one).

John, is search working in all forums & for longer than 2 weeks (the other timeline I heard)?

It seems that there some issues with search -- the biggest one being that if the search gets a large result set an error is generated. How big a result set is that -- anything more than about 70 megabytes. The best thing to do when this happens is to narrow the search so the result set is smaller.

There may be some other issues and we may need to reindex the board -- I'm hesitant to do that though because it takes a longtime to complete -- about two days.