In what way is the search function in Lemmy awkward to use,

Generally, I find that it requires too many clicks.

To search for things I’m usually interested in, I have to click a link to reach the search page, wait for the page to load, click a drop-down box, select and click a target type from the list (e.g. “Posts”), click a scope (usually “Subscribed”), click another drop-down box, select and and click a date range from the list, and then enter my search. That’s a lot of steps.

(I could enter my search before selecting all those other things, of course, but it wouldn’t reduce the number of steps, and it would put extra load on the instance host by triggering multiple extra searches before the one that matters to me.)

Also, in certain cases like searching for a community by ID, there’s a weird glitch where the search yields no results at first, but clicking the Search button again gets the expected results.

is there anything specific that can be fixed?

Yes, I think the user friction could be improved in several ways.

I haven’t made a list of potential search improvements, but just off the top of my head, it would be convenient to have a simple search box in each community’s sidebar. Reddit had this back when I was using it, and it made checking for duplicates before submitting an article much more convenient than it is here.

EDIT 2:

It’s also inconvenient that the Community search field displays them in example.org/community format, rather than the normal !community@example.org format, and fails to recognize input in the latter format. The slash format might be a little easier to type for a minority of people who expect it, but it’s surprising by being unfamiliar to everyone else, confusing by introducing a second format for community links, and counterproductive by defeating copy/paste of a community link from someplace else.

My suggestion for this would be to standardize on !community@example.org format, and allow omitting the ! on input. It’s a dedicated input field just for community searches, after all, so the software shouldn’t need users to lead with a bang in order to know we’re searching for a community. Side benefit: Since this format places the community name before the domain, users could simply start typing the community name without having to remember what domain hosts it, and they would see useful autocomplete suggestions right away.

EDIT 1:

Outside of search, the first thing I would suggest is making Lemmy readable without JavaScript. This would make it usable by people who disable scripts for security and privacy reasons*, and allow more search engines to index it, both of which would expand Lemmy’s reach and utility. And, since we’re talking about Lemmy as forum software for communities beyond the fediverse, this change would avoid imposing new requirements and vulnerabilities on communities whose web sites do not currently require JavaScript.

*Note that this matters not only for someone’s home instance, which might be whitelisted for scripts, but also when following links to other instances, which is pretty common in my experience.