e.g. Orwell "Animal Farm" -movie
By looking at the example below the search box, we can tell three things: Keyword searches can be done on multiple keywords, phrases can be searched for by including one or more keywords within quote marks, and results can be ignored by prefixing the keyword with a minus symbol.
Match all words or
Match any words in the popup menu should mean that we can either find threads with all of our entered keywords, or with any of them. I generally choose the all keywords setting.
I also generally use
Search in topic subjects only as it is quicker, since does not return matches to threads with the keywords in the body of the messages, but only in their titles.
Anyway, thats how I think the functions should work. The other options are fairly obvious. The search function is similar to Google or other search engines, but will not have all of the features of those engines.