Deploying $N$ Brownian searchers reduces the mean search time for an immobile target merely by a factor $1/\ln N$. We show that this conclusion is highly sensitive to the short-time dynamics of individual searchers. Based on the telegrapher’s equation we demonstrate that the classical logarithmic scaling is only an intermediate asymptotic and ultimately crosses over to a much faster exponential decay with $N$. For anomalous diffusion with finite speed, we also show that superdiffusion leads to faster search than subdiffusion, as intuitively expected. Our findings provide a clear physical picture of redundancy and minimal search times in collective search relevant for many biological and physical systems.

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• Anomalous diffusion
• Diffusion
• Search strategy
• First passage problems