There any particular reason why the search seems to ignore some things? For instance, I search for mac, and it tells me no results, but I go to the OSX forum and just about every post has mac in either the title or the body? Any clues?

That IS weird, but mac* works for now.

I think it has to be a keyword longer than five characters or something. I forget where I read that or if I'm remembering something wrong, but if so it's probably to keep people from searching for "the" and lagging the server.

Forum search is not only a tad broken, it's entirely broken. They should just rewrite it to let us write our own regexps. That'd work much better.

To say it's "entirely broken" is an exaggeration. It's limited, to be certain. I do know that there are plans to do some more work on the website soon.

It doesn't work. Thus, it is broken. There seems to be a limit of about 50 results returned (the earliest result for a search for capital ship is from last month), using multiple words in a query assumes OR instead of AND, titles don't get searched (or is it that only titles get searched?), there's no way to search by poster name, there's no way to perform queries (a nice BeOS-style query form would be so, incredibly cool), the list goes on.

Why not just use a standard forum program like phpBB or something similar?