Question Finder (Smart Search) Plugin

I was wondering why the Kunena Smart Search (Finder) plugin is not installed even though it is included within the 3.0.3 distribution. All other plugins are installed by default.

Is this an oversight or is there a specific reason such as it doesn't work?

I thought I would ask the question before I attempt to manually install it and test it myself.
I have searched the forum for an answer and saw a similar question in an earlier release but no answer was given.

As far I remember, Kunena Smart Search Plugin/feature not work as it should be and that why Developers not want to add it. If I remember right, it take too much performance atm... maybe some developers have the time share it with a little more detail?

I think that the Kunena Smart Search relies on the new Joomla Smart Search feature, and there are some issues with that. As it is the weekend, most of the devs are unavailable at this time, but since the Kunena installer is not adding it, assume it is not ready yet.

Smart search plugin is disabled because of smart search was never built to handle more than a few thousand items of data -- meaning that while it does scale up, the disk space usage comes fast so huge that database updates may crash your server and cause serious performance issues and your site to go down. There is a way to fix that issue, but it makes Smart Search less useful.

You can install and enable the plugin manually, but be warned that it isn't always able to keep the index up to date and there's no guarantee that it even works. Also it hasn't been integrated to Kunenas own search yet.

Because of the issues with smart search index size I've been investigating other solutions for the search issue together with RocketTheme.

Thank you for your answer, it makes a lot of sense. I myself have wondered about the size of the created finder index files, even on a modest site, so it is easy to understand why it would be a problem on a large site.

A shame really because there are some definite benefits using the finder (smart search) rather than the standard search mechanism, just that the headaches outweigh the benefits.