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I noticed I was able to exceed the 140 chars limit by directly appending the query to the URL.
I believe this could be abused in an unwanted way since searches are *expensive.
* or why there is a limit on "You can only perform 6 searches within a 60 second window, please wait a moment and try again"?
Not to burst any bubbles, but you didn't exceed any actual search limit, just an arbitrary 140 limit in the search UI up top. To be clear: the character limit is enforced (and it's actually 80, we truncate you down after that if you notice...). We just purposefully exclude tags and spaces from being part of the 80 character limit.
This may (probably will) change later as we get some time to address search, but we have much bigger infrastructure fish frying at the moment.
To prove this is true, take a look at this search: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=This may (probably will) change later as we get some time to address search, but we have much bigger infrastructure fish frying at the moment and more long search query terms added to the end of the statement here to make sure we exceed any limits
Note the actual searched text on the right: "this may probably will change later as we get some time to address search but we have much bigger", 98 characters (18 spaces, 80 in actual terms).
