Posted by B.Ramburn in 
While going about a few forums lately I have realised that a lot of forums have search flood enabled. That annoyed me quite a lot as I was looking for something quite important.
Then a question poped-up in my mind: “Why do we need to have search flood?” Does Google have that?
I will answer both yes & no as there are advantages and disadvantages to having search flood on a forum enabled.
Yes
Yes, search flood is good. It stops users from querying the server too much. Therefore less server stress and lag in showing up your pages. But this can only apply to major boards. To counter act that, the big boards could allow pages to be crawled by Google and use Google as the main search engine for the forum.
This can also stop users from abusing it to try SQL injection or whatever they do to hack the system.
No
No, search flood is bad. It doesn’t allow users to find what they want on your site. Especially guests who would like to view a certain topic or article on your site but he/she is finding it hard to with a search flood control active. If you think about it you want new users and more page views so showing them an error page like a search flood error page is not real content. And if there is no real content, Google ads or whatever ads system you use cannot display target ads, therefore not a lot of great amount of revenue. But if you let users search through as many time as they want they may be able to find what they want thus generating more page views. Hence more revenue or commitment to users.
How you can benefit?
Aside from more page views you’ll get better subscribers to your forum. How? well you could get them to register to read the topic page instead through the search. Why? because if they know the article/topic exists from the search then they would really want to register to view it.
Summary
I would have the search flood but kept at around 2-5 seconds to stop the goons from abusing it. 2-5 seconds flood will allow them to still search what they want without getting them frustrated.
What do you think?
