If you provide X service and allow people to manually search for players, corporations, and alliances and whatnot (think www.evemarketer.com’s searchbar, or zkill’s searching), you would often throw that name against /search/ to be certain it exists (and fetch the IDs in the process). That’s fine and acceptable.
Starting at a[...]a and blasting your way to a[...]z and repeating that until you reach z[...]z, forwards and backwards hammering as many requests out as your network is capable of shoving out at once to discover characters, structures, whatever, is the extremes of the abuse in question that will very quickly lead to you being banned from accessing ESI.
edit: automation is not necessarily… prohibited. Just, use it in moderation. If you build a wallet tracker, it’s perfectly acceptable for your program to pick out names and stuff, and then search those to fetch IDs and whatnot. Moderation is key. Bear in mind, while it wasnt an unintended use of the /search/ endpoint, using it as a discovery mechanism had been tolerated as long as it was gentle and in moderation. Some people caught wind of this “feature” and proceeded to be neither gentle nor moderate, thus the name of this thread- PSA Warning: This is Why We Cant Have Nice Things