Duckie: Tuba said she’d pass it along to the suits. Since Boardreader hasn’t subsequently been laid low by the awesome might of the Chicago Reader’s legal team, one might reasonably conclude that they’re not too worried about it. And since a Boardreader search yields thread titles that link back to the SDMB itself, I can’t fathom what sort of complaint they’d have anyway. Don’t look a gift search engine in the mouth. 
Yep to both. Even this very doorstep metaphor had been used before.
There’s already enabled a vBulletin feature restricting the search to once every 30 seconds per user, and the time period to search in defaults to the lowest value. The default forum could be changed though. There’s not much left to be optimized without changing or adding code. Like other vB users have done before, the search engine could be optimized to base on a sepecialized program like htdig. The whole search could be outsourced to a paid service offered by Google. But making such changes would need more time than the admins are likely to be able to spare in the next months (or years…).
Lowering the server’s priority of the searches, if possible, actually may work backwards. The database is locked while a search query needs access, to have it not changed by something else in the middle of it. Delaying this would make even more other page requests queue up meanwhile. Perhaps it would optimize things to alternately enable and disable the search for some time, or just turn it off during the time of the day when searches hurt most, or add code to limit their number. But see above, when even adding a simple reminder in big red letters to the search page looks like too much work.
I wonder if this locking is an intrinsic requirement of the database, or if this behaviour couldn’t just turned off somewhere in vB. The search index sometimes already gets messed up by the hiccuping hamsters, no need to guarantee the latest changes to be included in every search.
BoardReader can’t possibly be ‘officially’ mentioned in the FAQ. Of course we would choose a more refined wording, but it still would boil down to “please feel free to hog this company’s resources instead of ours”. Without having an agreement with them it wouldn’t be right. Could we try to make one or/and change our search page to one “powered by BoardReader”, or is there still some pride left?
Literally, the juries are still out on what exactly a search engine and its cache means to the copyright. After all, Cecil’s columns already were accessible through Google’s cache long before BoardReader existed.
Okey-dokey.