The search index is updated every morning at 4AM, Eastern US time.
Phrase searching is not currently supported by the engine. This means that searching for "CPAN testers" will not limit itself to cases where the word "testers" follows the word "CPAN", and will instead (assuming that the default exclusive search type is in effect) yield every message which contains both of those words. Phrase searching is one of the eagerly anticipated features slated for the next version of ht://dig, the engine in use at bumppo.net.
Punctuation characters like hyphens, periods, and @ signs are discarded in both search terms and in the search index. You can always tell if your search terms have been modified, as they will be reported as the first item in the search results.
Characters such as "<", ">", and "&" will be indexed as their HTML entities: '<', '>', and '&'. This can cause confusion in searches, because ampersands and semicolons will be stripped, as noted above, turning an ampersand into "amp" and a greater-than symbol into "gt" when they're indexed. This can be easily fixed, but fixing it will break some browsers.
Please direct archive-related comments or suggestions to archives@bumppo.net.