You're completely right about that: Google Search was a much better product 20 years ago... I don't know what has gone wrong with that product team, but they've taken something that used to be eerily good at what it did, and somehow turned it into a completely useless POS.

(I mean, sure, the web was smaller and nicer back then, so search in general was a more tractable problem, but even so, Google really did have something special about their ethos and engineering philosophy back in the day; these days, not so much: they wandered from the path and basically never found their way back onto it... I never choose Google for anything anymore, now I just use their stuff when I'm effectively forced to.)

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On-topic: No offense, but this thread reads like a bunch of first-year nursing students talking about how to do a triple bypass.

Figuring out the sequence of 4D chess moves that would eventually map the forum's database onto some kind of custom rendezvous-hashing-type distributed storage layer, while keeping everything running basically as-is (leading up to, during, and after the migration), is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it's pretty much at the tippy top of the complexity totem pole in terms of things that could be done to Bitcointalk. Show me the programmer that estimates they could pull off a task like that, and 999 times out of 1000, I'll show you someone that doesn't really understand the problem.