I just joined up, full of enthusiasm, but this is disappointing news.

The Search / Advanced Search is a really fundamental tool for a large forum. I appreciate that a general Google-type search is possible across the forum, but it's not the same at all, and has far fewer possibilities.

Have you asked vBulletin for advice? I've administered a few vB boards in my time, and always found them to be extremely helpful for solving technical issues. There's no obvious reason why there should be server crashes, even with millions of posts. Maybe it was a temporary issue?