Some quick suggestions:
add "order by author"
Maybe add a "limit search to this category" (ie: culture/society, political humor/cartoons)
Add a date range so people can look at a narrow band of time
If you want to see what a really nice article search engine looks like, just look at the search engine on LEXIS-NEXIS. (of course, the whole business of LEXIS-NEXIS is centered on their search engine, and this is just a peripheral thing for FR).
You could put multiple fields in, like one for "search for any of these words," and another field for "search for this exact phrase" and one for "search for threads NOT containing any of these words" so people could combine different search capabilities.
I agree. Many columnists are carried by a number of papers, and each paper appends a different headline. Causes duplicate posts.