I apologize if staff have set out their reasons before. If an old thread exists, I can’t find it because the present search system seems designed to drive a person insane with frustration.
Before free posting returned I could see the argument in keeping Search restricted to paying members. But now surely there’s no good reason not to allow the googlebots in?
It’s clear that the servers here will never be able to cope with unlimited searching. Can’t we please let Google do what it’s best at?
I recall that at one point the boards were opened up to spidering, and it caused massive slow downs and lockups that went away when the permissions were removed again.
fachverwirrt remembers it correctly.
At some point we will be switching to a third-party search engine and opening up the board for spidering, but for technical reasons we’re not there yet.
From the “current status” thread:
Deferred
Allow search engine spidering of content
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Next Priorities
Review multiple threads reporting problems and amend Next Priorities list
Review whether to rebuild the internal vBulletin search engine index so that the 1.3 million restored posts will be keyword searchable. This may be skipped if it seems server intensive. Installation of a new third party search engine will eventually resolve this issue.
Ah, that clears it up. Thank you both.