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In answering this question I stumbled upon some peculiar behavior.

No account: 500 hits

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Incognito mode: 500 hits

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I'm not sure why this is...

Question: When not logged in, why is my search limited to 500 hits?

I'm not sure if this is a "bug" or a "feature".

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    Risk mitigation; anonymous users using search to scrape the site is a bigger problem than a user with an account that is doing the same, so anonymous users are rate limited on the number of search results returned for any given search.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Jan 21, 2020 at 13:03
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    (Note: I'm speculating, I don't have first-hand knowledge that it is a rate limit, but if it wasn't this would be a very peculiar bug indeed. It wasn't listed in the rate limits FAQ nor can I find any other explicit confirmation).
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Jan 21, 2020 at 13:06

1 Answer 1

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Search is heavily rate-limited in various ways for anonymous users for performance reasons. Anonymous users get cut off after 500 results and are also limited to three tags when performing tag searches. I believe there were a couple other minor features that are disabled for anonymous users. The sorting options were also disabled at the time, but I don't know if they are still disabled for anonymous users.

They were implemented many years ago to mitigate a DDOS attack and then never removed.

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  • I thought the restriction against searching multiple tags as a logged-out user was removed a while ago. In 2015-16 it didn't work, but sometime in 2017 it started working, and I just tested today and it works.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jan 21, 2020 at 16:54
  • @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Looks like we increased the limit to three tags. After that, we cut off additional tags.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jan 21, 2020 at 17:03

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