Thank you very much!

will we be able to tap into your database?

Yes, I've planned to make the Web API public as soon as I can make a living with my rewards here. I would probably get me two fast privex machines. One for steemworld itself and one for other developers.

how will you implement search and filter functions. These are sadly inadequate now with current Steem APIs...

That is one reason why I'm building the API. I think the public steem nodes should not be used for most developer tools because there are just a hand full nodes available and nearly every week there come new tools which all are making many requests to these few. That won't work well much longer I think.

For the search and filter functions I will create an extra db because I need huge full text indices for a much larger time period and that of course can't be done by joining all the weekly databases.

The API will have some parameters for searching and filtering so that one can retrieve only the operations of a specific kind, posts with desired tags/text etc.