In defence of James, I've tried the search function in the past. After failing to get a hit my first time, subsequent attempts came back with something like, "You just finished doing a search... try again later."
In sympathy with the "search first" crowd, I guess one could always try using Google's advanced search feature to see what hits one can get on the BEArchive. I haven't tried it, so no idea if they have a strict robots.txt setup.