For a while now, some of the most consistent feature requests we’ve gotten from users have involved improvements to Instapaper’s full-text search engine. For months now, the existing search infrastructure had been stretched to its current limits. In order to continue scaling and implement a lot of the features you’ve been requesting, we needed to completely rebuild our search infrastructure.
In the past, searching for a saved article in Instapaper has been less than ideal. Oftentimes, it couldn’t even match a query string whose contents were literally in the title of a saved item (e.g., searching for devour prince wouldn’t actually lead to results for a saved Devour post that had prince in the title).
I tested the new Search and it had pretty decent results:
Also, the new and improved Search is currently only available via the webapp—not iOS (at least for now):
Rebuilding the backend for Instapaper’s full-text search is the first (and most complicated) step in our overhaul for search. Some of the features listed above like paged results, sorting options, and advanced search options are only available on instapaper.com at launch.