Has a developer, I should have the ability to disable SearchCount from being returned on every call is issued to content/search fetch function.

Even if keywords are already indexed, testing for limitation policies has impact on performance, depending on the site's size or complexity.

The total number of hits for keywords are not always required. I would like to be able to decide if and when the value is calculated.
For instance, quite often, these totals are not useful in back office operations. As much as it's not useful in some of the front end views.

A suggestion to implement this is to add a new parameter to the fetch function .
The default value for this parameter could go into site.ini:SearchSettings (overridable by site access).
Within the API (and eZFind, if needed be) the value from this parameter would trigger (or not) the count to be calculated and retrieved