[Frostmourne27]

Graeme is correct - although he hinted at it, it is in some way NOT random. That is, a mage with the strands that is N7 always has the same max search using it, although it is a random amount up to that number every turn, in every province. IMHO it's a pretty crappy spell - by the time you get it, you should have site searched almost everywhere. Especially if the fix the site search algorithms.