<…>
I got Error 524 (a timeout occurred) after around those two minutes you mentioned in your example.
Actually, the example is pretty good to illustrate a couple of things about the forum search engine. Besides the potential timeout error one may encounter, the other thing to bear in mind is that the forum’s search engine (SMF in general) is a dummy one, and it is literate with the sought words in the search string, as opposed to Google searches, where some intelligence applies.
Take for example the same search pattern: "how trust system work bitcointalk". Asuming that the quotation marks are not actually part of the search string, the forum’s search engine will, by default, search for
any of the words in the search pattern. We can assume that "how" is going to have a gazillion entries, and so will "Bitcointalk".
What's more, the words are searched for as what seems to be substrings. For example, the said search pattern will return results containing words like "ecosystem", "working", "trusting", "show", "networks" and "however".
In order to see the above in play, we'd need to delimit the timeframe of the search to, let's say 365 days, which is a generally good practice to reduce the number of results being returned, obtain rather recent results, and avoid the timeout issue.
Since the search is, as I mentioned, pretty dummy, it's best to spoon feed it a more concise search string, such as "trust system" (perhaps keeping the quotes, as well as the delimited timeframe).
One may also ponder the sort order of the results, leaving it either as it is by default (most relevant result first), or choosing most recent or oldest first (which are rather practical).
Last but not least, delimiting the boards to search may also come in handy in order to reduce the scope of the results to the boards we are most interested in to seek the search results from, reducing stress from the search engine as a byproduct.
