I've been using thunderbird for years and I still find search to be bad. I've never really made experiments to see why it's bad, but often I type the name of a correspondant to find a particular message, but I don't find it. I guess I am used to the fuzzy search magic that happens in other software.

Ctrl+Shift+F and "search all of the following" with multiple filter lines returns me what I need most of the times. It required switching my workflow though, yeah, the Google's fuzzy email search is really good.

Indeed, search in thunderbird is ok, but search in gmail is awesome. I started archiving my emails in folders and subfolders again once I stopped using gmail interface.

Indeed, on a fresh installation search works really well.

It's after I add accounts and start downloading emails that it begins to suck.