Is there a way to make the search engine less complicated? I mean this to say that unless you know the specific name of the thread you are looking for, its hard to just search using terms. and if the term is too broad or too short, it doesn't even try to search it. (I kind of would rather not repeat threads if they are already there)
Not sure whether this will help, but you can use the mighty power of Google to search the forum put site:www.writingforums.org search term into the google search box. If you put "search-term" in quotes, it will list all the posts with that exact phrase