I have found that if you do a search programmatically, it is really
fast, much faster than I imagined compared to the portal  Search. I think
the portal and it's converting the results into html takes more time
than the search. As far as timing your custom  search, you can use
various approaches to get good estimates on time  such as timers or win
api timers. For the portal search, you would probably need to dig in and
add some custom code which I am not sure is worth it. Another way is to
possibly use Application Test Center to create some scripts and get the
timings.