Currently, if you use Google search with the site:freerepublic.com modifier to try to find something here, you get a malware warning about Free Republic from Google, and the links mostly don’t bring you here, they give you the linked-to link from the top of the article. So you get taken to NYTimes.com or whatever, and don’t get the FR page and comments, which of course are often more valuable than the source article.
Try it and see if you get that as well.
I use Advanced Search in Google all the time to find an article or thread. What you describe has never once happened to me. I get the normal FR pages in search results.