In all honesty, I have never even noticed that HN didn't have search. Coming from reddit, I'm used to googling with "site:" and I've always done that with HN as well. My point is that HN does not need search.
I think it very much depends on how you use HN, if you use it just for the consumption of 'news' then I can see why you would not need search as much, but HN is much more than that.
It's an awesome resource, there are plenty of comments that are literally gems when you're stuck on something or starting with some new tech and that's when search comes in really handy.
First, I'd stare at the Clojure webpage, and try some examples in the REPL. I'd feel like I'm not grokking idiomatic Clojure, so I'd try some Google searches, but find nothing compelling. I'd hit random Clojure links on Hacker News and Reddit for a few weeks, but give up and move to a language with a more active community.
A year later, I'd accidentally find it at the bottom of an unrelated post and yell "If only I had that a year ago!"
I concede that search is sometimes useful for any site, but google does a pretty good job and I respect pg's reluctance to mess with it. I do keep a list of HN articles that I want to be able to go back to.
Plenty of times though, the same subject will pop out in a number of different locations, searching before posting helps a lot in avoiding getting the same content on the homepage twice.
