@Ted Clayton -

Hi Ted, I really don't understand where you are coming from. I don't think we are seeing the same site if you say there isn't really any difference to what is available on wordpress.org.

If you go the the "Advanced Search" at http://searchwpplugins.com you can filter and sort on multiple conditions in a single search.

Say you want to only see plugins with a rating of 4.55 and above you can specify. If you only want to see plugins that have a significant number of ratings and weed out all those 5s which have only been rated once or twice, then you can do that. If you only want to return plugins which have been updated since whenever you choose, you can set that too. Say you want to find plugins that have several tags, you can specify that by comma delimiting the entry in the tags field. If you want to use boolean searching on the Name and keywords fields you can do that too.

And what is more you can use all of these filters in a single search and specify the sort order of the result set.

Perhaps you know of a search facility on wordpress.org that comes close to this, but I certainly haven't seen it.

@Ted Clayton -
I tested the newsletter signup three times with no issues getting wrong captcha reports.
If that isn't what you were referring to, then I'd say the account sign up pages aren't linked in yet, so I'm not expecting people to be signing up for accounts at this stage because this section isn't complete or public.