The search/archive could use a drastic overhall.
After a few days, a topic rolls off the planet. Just today, I tried to go back to find an article I saved to hard drive and inadvertantly deleted. It was an article about the USS Lincoln providing aid during the tsunami. The search (title by date) only allowed me to go back one page of listings, which listed articles only for about the last 2 weeks.
It is too bad that the historical content gets so easily lost after a few days. I have yet to see any search engine, however, including Google, that allows searches between specific dates or earlier than a specific date. Google does some indexing of FR and I usually rely on it to do any searching.
FR has allot of historical content, but unless someone has saved a link or just happens to know how to get to a particular article, trying to go back and find a specific article is next to impossible.
Likewise adding the Google "site:freerepublic.com" search function to limit Google to searching FR works well.