search is just plain broken for me. probably noscript/cookie issue (oddly.. worked a few days ago...)
For years now, I've gotten much better results by using the site:forums.elementalgame.com tag at a real search site, or better yet a privacy-respecting Google alternative like http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm .
I haven't tried the local search in quite some time, but it used to 'work' except that it was outsourced to Google and the results provided within the forums weren't as good as the results for the same search run directly at Google.