[jmstout]

Good points, but I can't help but feel like these issues should be considered and addressed during the early development of a service.

You're right, you can get into some serious trouble putting the cart before the horse. But, what gets me in this particular instance, is that 42floors is a service that's been on the market for well over a year. Their core competency, hell, core business, is search, and they still haven't implemented any form of caching.

I can't shake the feeling that caching search results, especially in this scenario, should have been a huge priority.

It seems like too many developers hear the mantra of avoiding "premature optimization" and interpret it as "unnecessary optimization."

Then they end up over a year into their business without having addressed something that should already be an integral part of their architecture.