It was a product of the time. At the time you had the copyright trolls who would use the peer search function that was available on earlier p2p tools, and use t

It was a product of the time. At the time you had the copyright trolls who would use the peer search function that was available on earlier p2p tools, and use that as the basis to blast out shakedown letters. By removing search from the protocol it meant that they actually had to join the swarm. Also, this led to the creation of private trackers.