Certainly do, Amin, but it's not the searching
per se that makes the exclusion feature useful to me (and I'd hope to others)
I browse the forum by having my "home page" (as it were) land on the view given by
SeriousCompacts.com - Active
So every time I refresh to this page, I get all the latest posts at the top in bold.
Other people might use "Forum/New posts" for a similar but not identical view.
If I'm able to exclude certain forums, then it will only show posts from subforums in which I am interested. So stuff I'm not interested in (say for instance, things starting with a letter of the alphabet between ... hmm ... lets see ... W and Y
) won't appear.
But because you sensibly originally set the forum up so that gear and image threads are largely separated, if I exclude a few gear forums, I wouldn't then miss out on images, which is what I'm most interested in.
(this is particularly convenient on extremely busy forums, especially those which have international regional subforums)
Hope this makes sense/is clear?