Thank you for your input. First, the ads help pay for the site. Hosting isn’t free, domain registration isn’t free, and the people that work on and maintain the site don’t work for free. There is overhead to consider and ads are the most direct way to pay for that.
As for the search. The forum is huge. So huge in fact that when it was ported over to this new site it took about a year to do. Sadly, the search function went away along with that transition. However, we are working on bringing back a search function that crawls the forum as I type this. As soon as it is available it will be implemented on the site. For now you can use the search function on the home page to find information more quickly.
My apologies for any inconvenience. Thank you again for your input.