I'm not sure what you mean about the ads - they have been there for some time. There were a bunch different ad placements, mostly displayed to non-members, that were never -re-implemented after the forum software changed and I will add back over time. In the last month the only new ad is just the one on the forum index page.
As for search - I have had numerous complaints about the functionality of the forum search. The software vendor promises some fixes to that, but in the meantime I added the Google search to help people out.
And BTW - the Google search was on the site before the software change as well.