User blog comment:Daniel Baran/Search Developments: Big Picture/@comment-1724320-20120509011819/@comment-1724320-20120509035700

I've found that all of those redirects were quite necessary for us, because the search feature was so poor that we had to hand-code all of the redirects. There was no typo correction whatsoever, so we had to take matters into our own hands to make sure that our readers reached their intended pages. By making all of the redirects that we did, we reduced visits to Special:Search by more than two-thirds, saving about 4 million unnecessary searches per year. All of that is useless now, but given the information I had at the time it was the right decision.