PurpCat (V2) (need more art) on Nostr: So the story with Mastodon and search is that Eugen (circa 2017) did not add it ...

So the story with Mastodon and search is that Eugen (circa 2017) did not add it because it was used on Twitter by people to fuck with each other. This is also when Eugen was solely pandering to bubble wrapped retards. This began to change with the infamous hashtag trends saga which led to the idea guys being really, really, pissed off.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-fediverse-eugen-rochko/

But the problem is, it gimped discoverability. Normal people online want to find other people into the same thing, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater wasn't the fix. Furthermore, the fastest growing fedi instance recently (using Misskey) has full text search and even someone on github said "yeah artists want this".