Faceted search is amazing and powerful but it can totally bust the concept of caching your website.
How difficult would it be to set limits on the number of facets of each type that can be selected, with a permission to ignore these limits? This way an anonymous visitor could select three tags, two content types, and one author (for example) limiting the combinations to be cached to something like (2×200)×(1×10)×(1×50)=200,000, AKA 2×10⁵, rather than bots spidering through all the combinations that are available, something like (200!)×(10!)×(50!) = 8.704153×10⁴⁴⁵ (i know the math is inexact but i think the orders of magnitude are about correct when selecting more of a given facet expands the results. As far as caching, this makes the needs when all options for every facet are selectable effectively infinite. And then multiply by the pages of results for infinity times 20…).
This could be a per-facet option that sitebuilders could enable for "expensive" facets, enforced both with JavaScript for a good user experience and on form submission for strong protection.
Paired with a permission like "Ignore facet option selection limits"
Perfectly happy to put this in a contrib module but i think i need help with feasibility and architecture. Thanks!
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Perhaps this could be done with an inbound path processor?
I've been running into issues of bots crawling sites that don't seem to respect the rel=no-follow directives on facet links. This has affected nearly all of my projects. This would be one step towards improving the issue. I am researching how this can be more thoroughly addressed however.