Both search and newsfeed are two things on the site that I struggled with the most when I made the first version of the site. Can’t see any problems with doing that today, but I guess that’s what they call experience.
I added support for guestbook and comment search upon request from the users. For the newsfeed I made sure there are no dead links that the old version had a lot of.
There has been ideas on making merged newsfeed entries too, such as “User1 and User2 commented on your pattern” instead of two separate entries. I guess that will have to be a future project. There are a lot of basic things that I want done first.