hi.
the new search engine is online at http://search.pbase.com/search
it is still very much in development, but it should be an improvement over the old search engine.
the most obvious and probably useful change will be that galleries are now indexed. not just images.
usernames, and fullnames are indexed to point to your root gallery.
unobvious but important changes to the internal workings.
the search engine is now running on its own separate database so there should be no performance issues from it affecting the rest of the site.
while it won't be updating for the next two weeks, after that, the new design should provide for fast updates to the index, and faster queries.
you won't see any changes to it for the next two weeks, but the next steps are to improve the user interface which is now very crude, and then there will be an ongoing project to improve the results.
the current ordering of images and galleries is very simplistic and does not factor in various data that could help. it's not too bad though.
as with most common areas of PBase, the images and galleries displayed are those in public, non-passworded galleries from paid accounts.
-slug