Yeah, I suppose it does mean search goes down completely. Probably the better way to do this is to build a new index and then atomically swap the one that searches run against. Then I'd feel better about a 3hr refresh. However, that's a bunch of work :). I can bump this down to 1 day.

The issue is that my change only affects the current instance. We talked about flipping the LastUpdated flag to trigger the other instance but the issue is that the indexer only looks at the latest package version right now. In order to properly trigger the right removal, it will have to pull a totally different query to find packages with no listed versions. I figured it would be easier to bump up the frequency and fix this when we move search off the web-role.