Search engines’ carrying capacity

In biology there’s a term called Carrying Capacity that refers to the maximum population of animals an ecosystem can contain.
a16z’s Andrew Chen, in his book The Cold Start Problem (where he wrote about network effects) borrowed that term from biology to say every modern network has a minimum and maximum network size problem to solve.

Here’s how I interpret that for the current state of search engines:

In the same way that it takes a critical mass of searchers and information to kickstart the network effects of a search…