A good search engine would be quite important. One thing that annoyed me back on the site that should not be named was that their search engine was completely useless - It was not even capable to find posts where I entered verbatim text of.
Having a good search engine that can actually find a post I was looking for would be a major plus for the fediverse.
Nope. If someone found such a backdoor, it is more likely he/she sold it to the three letter agencies, who love hoarding vulnerabilities like that.