Question regarding broken search functionality

What was it in the current update that caused search, which had functioned perfectly fine since beta up to the day of the update, to suddenly break and become unavailable for over a week? The lack of open communication on this issue, other than "we hope to bring back the previous way of searching" and "sorry, no update yet on classified refunds" is certainly not helping. The loss of Find Places and the classifieds has had a dramatic impact on business within SL and is a completely showstopping problem - surely you could put out more timely and less vague information on something so important, not from just a spokesperson but from people actually involved with this problem.

As of this writing all Search> functionality is restored except for Search>Places which we have turned off deliberately. Turning it off is allowing us to diagnose and address some of the problems we've been having with database load. You may also see us turn off other parts of search for short periods of time while we continue the testing.

Also, Cristiano, yesterday, Jesse posted the following update to Classifieds:

Classified Listings Auto-renewed for an Extra Week at No Charge
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/06/classified-listings-auto-renewed-for-an-extra-week-at-no-charge/