The reason why searching for "david salo" didn't yield the right thread is that in it, "david salo" only appears in a quote. "salo" spits out 53 threads, the right one among those.
So, unfortunately, the search function does not search within quotes.
As for the other problems, I think that if you rule out the possibility that you used the wrong parameters, the culprit might indeed be your browser and/or connection setup. In the latter case, I suggest a speed and especially tweak test at
www.dslreports.com , but only change that stuff if you know what you are doing [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
Searching on DSL shouldn't take three minutes unless perhaps you are saturating your upload stream 100%.