Actually the PM limit was raised to 800 then 1000, and now anyone can do full text searches.
I wish they would "sticky" these improvements on the top of all the forums when they happen, instead of posting it in the forum issues section. They also had posted in that forum, a warning for the planned big forum outage a few weeks ago, yet very few knew it was coming. To me the forum issues section means you have a problem, and is not the place people are expecting to go to find out good news.