FR search works just fine if you know how to use it. Make sure you're doing a title search (not a keyword search), and just use ONE key word from the article's title - not the whole title. For instance, if the article you're considering posting is titled "Denver bans buckets of poop at DNC protests," you should just do a title search for "buckets" or perhaps "poop." "Protests" or "Denver" would also be acceptable. I have found that the search engine is unable to handle words shorter than three letters, so keep that in mind.
As for why we don't use the Google search instead - I'm not sure if it's possible to make it sort by date, which is much more useful for these purposes. However with Google you could do a search for a whole string of words within the story and get decent results, I think.
But bottom line - FR search works decently if you do it right.
FR search functions
1) click on “forums” to show all forums
2) select the most unique word in the title of the article you want to post.
3) enter that word alone in the ‘search’ box, and select ‘By title (date), and hit ‘Search’
3a) direct URL >> http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?m=all;o=time;s=(your unique word)
4) this will find a duplicate 99% of the time.
(this is based on the older search engine)
“FR search works just fine if you know how to use it. Make sure you’re doing a title search (not a keyword search), and just use ONE key word from the article’s title - not the whole title. For instance, if the article you’re considering posting is titled “Denver bans buckets of poop at DNC protests,” you should just do a title search for “buckets” or perhaps “poop.” “Protests” or “Denver” would also be acceptable. I have found that the search engine is unable to handle words shorter than three letters, so keep that in mind.”
If you google “DNC” and “poop” you will trigger an infinite loop and cause the entire internet to shut down.