Nah, you're not wrong at all! Creating a functional internal search engine can indeed be a real pain in the ass, especially when you're dealing with a large amount of text data to search, just like in the case of this forum.

I bet TryNinja can give you a much better explanation and shed light on the issues he encountered, which eventually led them to implement an Elasticsearch search engine. While ninjastic.space does a great job at searching posts, the catch is that it only works with archived (original) posts, not the real-time forum database.