Understanding search results and potential timeouts

Some queries are computationally expensive for our search infrastructure to execute. To keep the Search API fast for everyone, we limit how long any individual query can run. In rare situations when a query exceeds the time limit, the API returns all matches that were found prior to the timeout.

Starting today, the Search API also now informs you when such a timeout happens. Reaching a timeout does not necessarily mean that search results are incomplete. It just means that the query was discontinued before it searched through all possible data. More results might have been found, but also might not.

In some cases, if you know that your search results are potentially incomplete, you might think about the data differently. By exposing timeouts when they happen, the API helps you better understand how to interpret the results.

We hope this is useful as you integrate with the Search API. In the meantime, we’re working on improving search so that these timeouts occur as rarely as possible. If you have any questions, let us know.