Removing the metrics/search endpoint

I'm proposing to remove the metrics/search endpoint. I suggested it in https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/pull/1197, but it isn't clear if it that endpoint in use by third parties. I'll cross post my reasoning here, and hopefully, if someone is using it, they will chime in and explain its utility.

The metrics/search endpoint isn't use by graphite-web itself, and the cost of initializing it when a tree contains millions of metrics, even when explicitly initialized in wsgi, seems to be prohibitive.

Its functionality seems to be superseded by browser/search (grep over the index file) and metrics/find (uses the storage engine for searching).

I've tried searching for code outside the project (there is none within) that calls metrics/search, or uses the keep_query_pattern parameter, but didn't find much. As a concrete example, grafana uses metrics/find, but not metrics/search. The last update to the behavior of search_view was 19ed37a in 2011, which seemed to add some commented out code, and remove a parameter.

It has a response format and semantics that doesn't seem very helpful for someone using it for search. which I have summarized in the pull request: https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/pull/1197

Does anyone still use metrics/search?

Thanks!
John