Search is falling apart

[Minoa]

URLs in question:

https://forum.nationstates.net/search.php?keywords=left+right+hand+traffic&fid[0]=23
https://forum.nationstates.net/search.php?keywords=most+common+flag+colour

This morning, I have been doing a search on threads regarding most common flag colours on NationStates, but it timed out, returning a blank page. Yesterday, I tried searching for a thread about the direction of road traffic in F&NI: that also timed out.

I checked that it isn’t Refresh Thursday.

I understand that using Google is an option, but not all players may realise that, hence I am filing a bug report here.

-- Minoa

[Reploid Productions]

When you search, are you typing

most common flag color
or
"most common flag color"?

The former hangs because you're telling the search to look for posts that contain all four words anywhere in the post; it's an extremely inefficient sort of search, especially when one or more of the words is very common like "most" is. The latter searches far more quickly because instead of searching for four separate items, it's simply searching for one larger item and thus has an easier time quickly parsing what its looking for. That's not a glitch or a bug, it's a basic computer resources issue; Nationstates has a lot of posts and only so much server power, complicated search phrasing is going to take longer or lag out entirely unless you can refine your search parameters, such as narrowing it down to a whole phrase in quotes or searching only a specific subforum.