well, I guess if your browse search takes more than 30 seconds then I'd be looking to add keys, or whatever to make the search a lot faster. I'm not sure folks will happily wait > 30 seconds for a set of search results these days.
But I guess if that code worked before it might work now. I'm not sure your NoOpChar should be empty - I think maybe it should be a '.', but this part of things has not changed... (Although sending noOps in a browse context could probably break the xml I guess. It was only designed for reports, not browses.
cheers
Bruce