I will note that I browse the dope almost exclusively by phone, and for whatever reason the built-in search seems to time out quite often, forcing me to a blank server fail page with no chance of ANY results, typo’d or not.
At times like this, the two-minute wait seems especially egregious.
I think this is perfectly understandable, as I think we’d all prefer to be able to read threads in a timely fashion than to wait less on searches if we had to choose only one. But, aren’t you guys now hosting the board on a multi-server setup, with one dedicated as a slave for mysql queries? I seem to remember that being announced a while back. If that’s the case, search should put far less of a burden on overall board performance than in the previous single-server situation.
A quick Google search shows that there are further improvements one could do, e.g. replicating the database to the slave server and searching on that so you don’t lock the tables people are reading the forums from, but they may be unnecessary if the current setup is capable of handling the search load.
The search feature drives the “new post” function and certain functions when you click on a username and look for “posts by this user” etc. If we lost the search function we probably wouldn’t have those functions any longer as well. For me, I use “new posts” all the time. I son’t think the volume of complaints is that overwhelming to justify turning off a feature to eliminate them.