Serious problem with Leopard search. I think it qualifies as a bug.

Question

If any of you can figure out a workaround for this, you'll beat Apple Support—which was unable to come up with a fix after more than an hour and a half on the phone (most of that time on hold).
As you know, the ability to click "Other" in the Search window has disappeared, so we can no longer specify certain volumes to search. The serious problem is this: If you need to search a volume on the network, such as a hard drive on your Airport Extreme, your only option is to select the Network icon in the Search window—which means you must wait for every computer and volume on the network to be searched!
A real-life example is this: All my music is on a hard drive attached to Airport. Two computers are in the network, so each can access the tens of thousands of songs on the hard drive. Under Tiger, searches on this drive were instantaneous. But now, under Leopard, try searching for a certain song on that drive, and it takes nearly 5 minutes (20 seconds would be a long wait!), because we cannot limit the search to just that volume. After my first search took forever, I searched two more times and clocked it with a stopwatch. The first took 4 min. 10 seconds, and the second search took 4 minutes 31 seconds. This renders Search useless for ordinary activity.
I strongly regret that this volume no longer can be listed in the sidebar of the Finder window, but I can live with that. (You have to navigate to it by clicking on the Airport base station icon.) However, one cannot live with 5-minute searches on a volume that requires intensive searching.
Until Apple fixes this, can anyone figure out a workaround, so that searches can be limited to just one thing in the network? (Imagine if there were 6 or 15 or 32 computers in the network!)
Thank you.

Answer 1

Folks, I have the answer...
While on the phone with an Airport Extreme engineer at Apple (on a different matter), I asked the question at hand. He answered it in a heartbeat, and it is very simple. But we're not all crazy—remember, I previously spent an hour and a half on the phone with an Apple Specialist who couldn't figure it out either, even while researching it as I waited on hold! Nor did anyone on this forum come up with the answer.
So... How to limit a search to an "air disk" (a hard drive plugged into an Airport Extreme)—without having to click on "Shared" in the Find window for an unwanted 4-minute search on ALL networked devices:
Simply open any Finder window, click on your base station in the left column, then click to highlight the name of the air disk in the next column. Then use the search field in the upper right corner of that window. Just as always happens on the Mac, that search will be limited to the item highlighted—in this case, the air disk.
As soon as you start a search, this way, the window changes into a search/find window which now DOES list the air disk across the top, in that line that begins "Search:"
Where we've all been thrown, on this, is that we were all expecting to go Command-F to get a search window while the air disk was highlighted. But that will NOT get your air disk listed as one of the search options! We cannot go Command-F; we have to type our search into an ordinary Finder window (with the air disk highlighted) instead of turning it into a search window first.
Truth is, the air disk really should show up in a Command-F window as a selectable item. But until that's fixed, the workaround is easy.
.