Currently, the search starts automatically whenever any input is changed. This means one has to be extra careful in certain situations, especially when playing SE in multiplayer - leaving "all surfaces" checked while changing any other settings can trigger an accidental resource-intensive search that may cause the game to hang for quite some time. Today I've managed to make the game unresponsive for ~10 minutes by accidentally changing from "Product" to "Entity" while still having Big electric pole selected, even without "all surfaces" checked (I was on Nauvis, and counting with find_entities_filtered... there are 19294 Big electric poles :D):

https://imgur.com/a/SLCX2mt

It would be nice if there was an explicit button to trigger the search instead of it triggering on any change. This would allow players to completely configure the search before committing to actually searching.

Yes please. Explicit button to start search as a configurable option would be a great addition. Every time I go to factory search I have to spend there 3 times more than I want because every time I change setting it freezes for a moment.

I actually whole heartedly agree, for example for the following recipes be careful when selecting or unselecting items;

• Wood with the option; entity.
• Log with the option; entity

As this with a huge map leads to very long loading times and non responsive screen of Factorio.
The game would find all the trees, but the amounts are vastly too much to search through so almost would like to suggest to disable this option, or have it behind an explicit are you sure option? before it starts searching, with bigger maps or multiple surfaces this leads to a non responsive game and almost made me reboot the game (after 2 min) it became responsive again with a huge list of results.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm reluctant to add another button to start searches as I want the tool to be very quick and intuitive to use. In today's update (1.11.0) I added a 1-second debounce to all the checkboxes which should help with this problem a lot. Let me know how it feels to use now. I might look at adding a 'confirm' dialog as well for particularly long-lasting searches (large maps, multiple surfaces, 'entity' mode, especially combined with resources/wood, 'ground' mode combined with stone... not sure how well this will generalise to mods).