Just wanted to vouch as well for yegg's amazing response. He fixed some l-key issues I complained about on duckduckgo within just a couple weeks, and responded to me within a day.
Maybe yegg could drop a comment on how he manages his time to do all this?
--Every few days I set aside a large block of time to go through that bug queue. If easily fixable, I fix it and respond back: "Fixed!" If not, I put it in another category, and explain why it is a complex issue and how and when it might get fixed (or not).
There is so much that can still be done as computational linguistics makes its way into how search queries are understood and how content is indexed and retrieved. Faster machines will make some things possible that were not (like instant search) soon!
Maybe yegg could drop a comment on how he manages his time to do all this?