As most long term forum users are aware, the built in forum search functionality has been next to useless.
About the only thing that it had going for it was that it was context sensitive depending upon where you were inside the forum. This would have been useful if it actually returned any meaningful results...which it didn't. If you really wanted to find something most of us would go to a search engine and use
site:ukbouldering.com etc
The other problem with the built-in search is that every time somebody searched for a new word or phrase, it added that search to a database table which has now got 17 million records in it. It goes without saying that this is a performance hog.
So, as an experiment I've updated the search box at the top right of the page so that you can use one of three major search engines to search for results from the site instead of the built-in system. No real need to explain, but just put in your keyword, select your search-engine and click the button.
I suspect that once you start to use it you'll find it far more useful than the old system, but as this is currently only experimental, it's not certain yet whether this will be kept permanently.
If you're crazy enough that you'd actually rather use the built-in forum search, you can still get to it from the "forum" menu under where your avatar is