Yes, this really does work.
Now, why don’t we just use this as an embed in the site instead of the mostly broken and almost never works search function we have now?
Good question...
Like Why to the monthly donors have to “suffer through freepathons” when it would be soooo easy to tag a a monthy donor’s screen name with a ‘paid’ tag - and avoid all the nagware adds for 50 or 60 days a quarter???
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.