Node with many links to it causes cron to run out of time in indexing

Problem/Motivation

I had "Cron run exceeded the time limit and was aborted." errors in log file.
I found that one node is used as CCK filed select more than 40000 times. And in table search_dataset in field "data" I could see long string with title of node - almost 40000 times.

search_cron() -> module_invoke($module, 'update_index') -> node_update_index() -> _node_index_node($node) -> node_invoke_nodeapi($node, 'update index') -> search_nodeapi(&node, 'update index', ...)

In search/search.module function search_nodeapi line 634:

    case 'update index':
      $result = db_query("SELECT caption FROM {search_node_links} WHERE nid = %d", $node->nid);
      $output = array();
      while ($link = db_fetch_object($result)) {
        $output[] = $link->caption;
      }
      if (count($output)) {
        return '<a>('. implode(', ', $output) .')</a>';
      }

As result of that $output has ~40000 captions from same node!
After that search trying parse all 40000 words in search_index() - here is server is slowly dying.

Proposed resolution

Simple solution - add DISTINCT in SELECT and live happy with 1-2 captions instead of 40000 after that field "data" in table search_dataset have captions only once:
In search/search.module function search_nodeapi line 634:

    case 'update index':
      $result = db_query("SELECT <strong>DISTINCT</strong> caption FROM {search_node_links} WHERE nid = %d", $node->nid);
      $output = array();
      while ($link = db_fetch_object($result)) {
        $output[] = $link->caption;
      }
      if (count($output)) {
        return '<a>('. implode(', ', $output) .')</a>';
      }