The boolean search is basic search in MySQL. It's been the default search since the site started, yes. This is why we have installed the sphinxsearch engine, as it's much more powerful. Unfortunately, as I said, the code does not yet support sphinx. Once it does, then yes, we'll be able to do more with search. Having said that, however, in order to not bog down the database itself, it's a common practice to LIMIT your results anyway. I expect we'll experiment with that, and see where our upper limit will be for the search once we have sphinx ported in. I DON'T expect to be able to search thousands at a time. Dedicated server or not, that'd kill the database for query load, and crash the site.