Disable Search Feature

When I was trying to do a search in one of the forum site, I encountered this.

Sorry, this feature is currently disabled.

Please try again during a quieter period.

I am wondering whether this is a good feature trade-off - to disallow users to search when the server is very busy and ask them to try later , or just allow them to do search by letting them wait a long time to view the result triggering frustration and high blood pressure.

Both have problems. For the site that disabled the search, I did not even get to know when the site will be free for me to do search. So, I will probably give it up and go to another site. For the latter option, I probably will "feel" the website is not in a good shape. Because users are guided by feeling or emotion when they choose to buy or use a products/services (ask Apple's loyal users, why they like Apple so much!), this will also have big impact. When people see your brands , they will recall the frustration for having to wait every few seconds to minutes when they click on each buttons of the website. They probably will tell their friends and that is a bad marketing strategy through WOM.

Thus, a great interface design and back-end programming are vital for a web product. That is why Google company is worth billions because their technology allows the search result to be displayed in split seconds.

And that is also why YouTube was bought over by Google even though at that time, there are others video streaming website and Google had enough resources to build their own video streaming program if they want to . In July 2007, YouTube announced that it is serving around 100 million videos per day. What’s more, the site served 2.5 billion videos to nearly 20 million unique visitors over the course of June. So, you may ask, what so special about a video streaming website that enabled it to attract the attention of Google and the rest of the world? My personal guess will be, YouTube has the key to handle that much load of a high video demands without hanging the server or application. And I never encounter this - YouTube asking me or other users to come back to view our selected videos when the server is less busy.