Me - never. Yet together with the Top Menu of Death it takes up at least 2/3 of the screen space on my laptop. How about removing it? There is search button in the top right corner already.
Hm, I guess everybody here has learnt to ignore the images and entries on the upper half of the community overview pages, so removing that search box (which I have not used before, either) may bear the risk that the top entries will be silently overlooked...
Maybe I would use it, if it would actually just return discussions...
At least this one is easy to fix - both Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin support custom filters :)