I found FR sometime in 1996 iirc via searching for something on altavista.com though I largely forgot about it until I rediscovered it years later and registered.
Used to be, I could google my FR username "Mrs. Don-o and a couple of keywords, and it would instantly and flawlessly ring up 20 or 20 or more FR Pages where I had written something about a particular topic.
The pages listed by google would be on-the-nose relevant and would go from today back to 2004, or even before that because I used to post on my husband's account, "don-o". Now when I google "Mrs. Don-o" and keywords, the first dozen results might not be from Free Republic at all, but the search would be glomming onto near-matches like "Mrs. Don O'Connor" or "DON occurrence" or even total non-matches.
All too often, there will be no FR matches for the first couple of pages, although they show up way down the queue --- or even no FR matches at all. Supposedly.
It's annoying, and I think it shows them screwing with the algorithm to miss most of the Free Republic matches they used to get.