I understand the purpose of the 300-second wait between searches as far as keeping the load under control. I also understand the reason for limiting search terms to words that are minimum 4 letters in length. But I don’t believe that a query that is immediately rejected for word length should incur the 300-second wait. Though it technically qualifies as a search, it never actually queried the database or generated any load. It’s just an irritating hassle whenever I type a search term without remembering the 4-letter limit.
Just to clarify, you mean a search made up only <4 letter terms, right? A search with at least one term 4 letters or greater does actually search, ignoring the <4 letter terms.
Hmm… it looks like you may be right. With the 3-letter term stripped out, my search return 0 terms in under one second, printing a message about the removed term. That made me think the entire query had been rejected but I guess it wasn’t.