re: search torrents: Torrents are listed at websites. LimeWire is not a web browser.
However if you are presently downloading a torrent file & it will not connect, chances are it's because nobody else is online with parts of the file you need.

If someone has a lot of incomplete gnutella files, to search all at once would cause a lot of traffic on gnutella network. LW does periodically auto search for hosts for a portion of the incomplete files at a time after a certain amount of time.