Since the in house search engine is broken and the cost of the resources we would need for purely in house search is very prohibitive, our search engine uses Google's search results, which, while not the most updated, definitely is better than nothing and has no timeout problems.
If a pure in house solution becomes feasible, we will move to that.
Also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but the WikiEditor smiley insert gadget has been removed and disabled due to ongoing issues, plan to replace this with a more stable extension in the future.