I always used websites to search for ed2k content much like with torrent. The internal search was more like a last resort. It would have been nice to have p2p shared indexes that just use public keys for authentication and you have to choose to trust them. Or something like a trust chain. And you can still fork them. Something I still miss for torrent.
But anyway, I still believe getting more websites “invested” into torrent or tracker hosting ultimately boosted torrents over ed2k. A bit of a paradox. Of course this is just speculation.