Alrighty, I've enabled the new search for everyone now - there's a few things I should mention.
First of all, it should be pretty damn fast.
The drawback is that it takes a few minutes for new submissions to appear in it - but IMHO that's a small price to pay for a site that's really usable.
You can do all the things you're used to on SF 1.0, i.e. you can search for multiple keywords by separating them with a comma, i.e. "Wolf, Dragon" etc.
There's also a way to suppress keywords from results by adding a "!" in front, for example: "Orca, !Human" will search for all orcas, but won't show you content that also contains humans.
There's still a few kinks to iron out, and of course various filtering controls are missing as of yet. - No wait, actually filtering is now in since a few minutes ago :)
Enjoy the faster search!