It works well. Just put in the box one of the words you think will be in the discussion. I just tried 'Bayer' and it found these posts. (Now if you use that it will find this one as well!)

Once the season wears on the search facility should be a very useful way of getting to discussions that covered something in the past. The other day I was using the search on Bee-L to find stuff I'd written years ago.

But most people just browse through the recent posts in areas that interest them, which is why I put the threads here under the heading that covers this topic.

In general we (me included, or perhaps me especially!) have been drifting around in these discussions, but I think that a degree of informality is better than being too rigid.