Also, I get the tag cloud thing, but there are just too many to process. There has to be a better UI in there somewhere--something like displaying the now biggest ones first and then asking for more.
The slowness can be well justify here, given the early startup stage the lack of powerful server to drive the search is acceptable. Search requires considerable Disk+RAM power.
Certainly speed requires fast servers, but if there's not much demand, there's a good chance that it will be faster than a popular service on a single machine.
For example, I bet twitter on a VPS had better uptime than the current version.
Also, I get the tag cloud thing, but there are just too many to process. There has to be a better UI in there somewhere--something like displaying the now biggest ones first and then asking for more.