Yes to all of that. forwardslash if you have search done by tomorrow night, drinks are on me and mk.
Serious question: are you guys thinking this is a 10-100 man-hour problem or a 100-1000 man-hour problem? Because there's your need for monetization: I suspect that if every active user donated $50, we still wouldn't have offered up enough coin to breach the "insult" barrier. I'm no programmer but I have a reasonable understanding as to why search is hard. It's one of many unwieldy problems that are going to rear their heads as the site evolves. In my opinion, there's a lot of real tricky coding that needs to happen and you're either asking someone to take several hundred hours on the chin or you're rolling a Miata's worth of coin into the problem. Which is great when there's enough love or money to go around but we all know that never lasts.
Comment threads are one of the worst cases for text search, because you're comparing short texts (query strings) to short texts (comments). There are ways to make it work, but most of them involve crunching some very big matrices periodically, and you don't want to do that if you don't have some big iron to do it on.
I'm no coder either so you're asking the wrong fella. Buuuut... It's been a LONG MOTHERFUCKING TIME COMING and I know that / is no slouch and has a strong work ethic, so I'm fairly confident it's a big endeavor. That said, this was one of those years where each of us on the Hubski team has had some major life changing, big stuff go down and we aren't where I'd like us to be developmentally. I don't think any of us are happy with that. We had some big goals. But... we are picking up steam. Edit: Also, it's worth noting that what we do have is pretty substantial. It's over 4 years worth of tweaks, updates, new functionality etc. That's something that shouldn't be overlooked but is easy to. I want search and I want an API. YESTERDAY. I'd like to give those things to you all (and myself as a user) and then add a donation button. The donation button will help with stickers, server costs, other swag and maybe, maybe, just maybe we can get forwardslash some help. But by all accounts, he's making some good progress building us a functional database to search... and beyond that it's above my pay grade. Basically though, we're asking forwardslash to take it on the chin. But, all of us on team-hubski do this. We don't run this place for the money, that's for damned sure.