The search function here absolutely sucks despite them pretending otherwise.
You can sort of use search to make sure you don’t post a duplicate item by searching on one unique term in the headline. That kind of works. Otherwise, the FR search is pretty useless. For general searching on FR, I use the normal search engines (Brave and DDG for me, Google is a last resort) with the site search tag site:Freerepublic.com at the end of the search string.
Thanks. I received some advice in another response. I try not to criticize because I love the site and I realize they run it on a shoestring and Jim has expensive health issues to deal with.