So, technically it does search, but it doesn't search anything useful - as a bunch of random examples, try any of these terms individually: nothing, respawn, flight, pokemon, halo, uncharted, xbox, ps3, ps4, pc and you should get results for each.
What it searches is thread titles for pages within the https://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/%topicID%/%topicname% URL format using the bing custom search tool (customsearch.ai) - that URL format is no longer used and the format simply re-directs to the current URL format pages now though, using the topicID only to load up the normal URL for the page. As a result, only old threads can actually be picked up in the search, and even then a very incomplete set of search results is returned, rendering it rather useless.
That said, it has been like that for a long time and as much as I'd like a functioning forum search like the old site had, it clearly isn't a priority as I don't think it's ever worked properly (though at least it does search the forums in a sense, at one point it didn't even do that) on this version of the site.
E.g. old format for this thread (everything after the 33595121 ID is optional though): https://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/33595121/forum-search-bar-does-nothing - of course all it's doing is picking the ID from the URL and redirecting to here though.
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