Since the new forum software has come into play, I've seen many people complain about the effectiveness of the search function. I think the confusion stems from the addition of a search box allowing you to search from anywhere instead of having to click "Search." The change to making that the Google search is great and it is quite effective but for those who want the old search function, you can have a more powerful version of it with the "Advanced Search" option. Click that and it takes you to a familiar-looking page where you can type your desired terms in, search by a username and then filter the results. What's really cool about the new search is that it can search either titles or entire messages as before, but now you can search within the first post of a thread as well. People don't change the post subjects often but you can search those too along with the message text.
Another great thing is that sometimes you know where a thread was posted, so you select that subforum. Other times, it could be one of a couple subforums. This allows you to select multiple subforums for your search terms. Very useful.
The thing that can be a bit frustrating is how to get to the posts where there's no subject in the title. You can do that by clicking on the topic title on the left side and you can find the post in the thread, or the easy way of clicking "jump to post" in the lower extreme right hand corner of the box for that post.
Nothing really serious here, just a few thoughts I figured I'd share on the new (and in my opinion improved) search function.