Unless, of course, there's more to it than that?
Just suppose that the partner search engine is housed on wonky servers? Let's imagine that someone made one search for that search term. But that due to the servers and/or software being $£&*ing useless, that search term somehow becomes looped and keeps on being sent out.
Now, in a strict reading of that search request, yes, it WAS a genuine request for information at first, but that the subsequent 49 were accidental repeats.
Hmmm. I somehow can't see Yahoo saying: "Hey! You caught us! We rely on useless partner search engines with wonky servers and software to keep our service going. Sorry! How can we resolve the issue to your satisfaction?"
And whole sets of data requests could have been hit in the same way, thus that would be a very expensive problem for Yahoo to have to bite down on.
I worked at one time for a major Directory Enquiry provider in the UK. The servers were wonky and every-so-often the text service we provided would go mad and one poor sod or another would get the same text message transmitted to their phone every minute until the server was taken off line for maintenance or the terminal was turned off. And as it was a 24 hour operation, sometimes a computer could be on for several days.
And has anyone else noticed the weird crap happening with Yahoo mail?
I have several Yahoo accounts. One is very busy receiving and sending dozens of emails a day. The others are not used nearly as much. It's the heavy use account that keeps being hit by 48 hour closures because of 'suspicious activity.'
I think Yahoo have choked on their unlimited server capacity deal, so are blocking ANY account that shows heavy usage to get their overall server use down.
Closing busy mail accounts for 48 hours and pretending that they can't understand why 50 returns from a minor search engine for an obscure search term is v. unlikely does not auger well for the future of Yahoo, IMO.