Their is a lot more to premium then forum searches. Basically, premium allows you to do things the easy way instead of having to dig through tons of info. Not only the forums, items, quests, ect, ect.....
At one point Allas offered a lot of more stuff for free and premium was looked at as a donation to the site. Now that they have grown to the size they have, they need premium to pay for the servers and everything. Can't say I blame them to be honest. I got into a conversation with one of the admins one time and the number of hits this site gets daily is amazing.