Search bar - increase character limit past 250?

Did what you said and achieved a lot of success! 

After some testing, here are my results: 

• Using this method, I am able to search for up to 100 items
• Searching for 101+ items results in the message "There are too many criteria in your query"
  
• It only works with "OR" separating the search terms
• When I try with semi-colons, I get no results

If you have any suggestions to further optimize this, please let me know! I

If not, thank you very much for the helpful solution.