I tend to get less upset that newbies (and even some non-newbies) don't use search, but

1) that they don't use the stickies. In most forums either the moderators or other members have spent EXTENSIVE amounts of times putting together incredible stickies with everything from base to advanced knowledge. I think these are terribly under appreciated and under utilized. I know in the DL forum our mods had to have spent 1000's of hours on them and I still see the same base questions posted that are DEFINITELY answered in these. And these stickies have GREAT tables of contents to them, so its not so you cant find the data

2) do not look at even the first page of current threads before starting a new one, too often they open a new thread when the same question was asked 4 lines down.

I will agree the search function itself can be a bit clunky, but FT is NOT a hard place for newbies to find info, in many cases they just dont choose to look!