Why is Search Places busted?

Given the kinda complex relations between prims and textures and link sets and owners and groups and etc, etc that SL seems to usually do a (more or less) decent job with I'm having a hard time understanding how Search Places could be causing such a problematic load on the DB that it needs to be shut down for so long.

What's the big deal with Search Places? Anybody know why this is such a painful thing for the database??

I don't think it's necessarily Places that's causing the problem (Popular Places only gets downloaded once at log in and they still turned that off several times). If searching alone was the problem I'd imagine that the first thing to go would be the "All" tab since it returns a whole lot of unnecessary things.

Also, if people can't search for places to go visit, they'll be tp'ing around a whole lot less which I assume means a whole lot less load. If that's the actual problem then I don't see places coming back for a very long time .

Search Places appeared to be back up briefly last night, but the crush on the DB made it unusable. So much so that I was getting unexpected results when trying to Search People, like for example getting a "None found" result when searching on an av that was standing directly in front of me.