I avoid google as much as possible.
The search isn't finished, but it is pretty good and it isn't google. The news comes from Yahoo's news feed. One cool thing is you can use the small fr icon to check to see if the article has been posted and it will then help you a little in posting the article. It also pre-filters out a lot of sites that Free Republic doesn't allow posting to. I always hate loading up stuff from a site (i.e. Huffington compost) and having FR say no thank you after you hit submit. Please try it and give me feed back. (I am hoping to move it to faster servers soon.)