When did this start?

Maybe I just haven't been paying attention. But 46 minutes ago? Not that I'm complaining, or that I even fully understand what that means xD Though I have noticed when doing a serch of my own posts it has went from something like less than 1 second to over 2 seconds to return a search (nothing complaint worthy) while whatever's going on in this Search New Posts thing took almost no time at all. So I'm assuming it's something designed to take some strain off the server. How's it work?

Yes, I'm being a curious idiot.

I remember sam said something about changing something so that the server would stop crapping out at midnight thirty. Maybe that's part of it?

It's a builtin feature of vB AFAIK. It caches the search results so it doesn't have to run the search query each time. I would expect the cache to expire sooner than 46 minutes though...

This would cause extreme hilarity in, say, the ciddies winners thread

Well I understand it now. It creates a list whenever I search, and it saves the list. So like if I Search: New Posts and it comes up with three pages. And I spend 46 minutes going through threads on page one (go to a thread, post, hit the back button, etc.) page two won't have to be dynamically created again, it'll just remember all the threads that were originally meant to be on page two, even if the search is 46 minutes old (i.e. no more of that "Your search returned no results" because I took too long doofing around on page one of the search [but apparently it expires at some point?]) I like this.

I just checked the board settings and it said that searches are cached for 1 hour.