Bugs's page's search form should search All bugs, not just Open ones
Myself and another here took the effort to report GNOME/gimp#2633 (closed) having searched for an existing bug using the form on https://www.gimp.org/bugs/
@ell spotted it was a duplicate, as was another, for the same issue, opened a few hours before mine.
The reason the searches didn't find the other bugs is because that form only searches Open bugs. That seems wrong. Many users arriving here will be to report a known bug that was introduced recently and has made it to their distribution, and it's quite probable that it's already been fixed, like this one was. So that search form should be searching All bugs, not Open ones. They'd still be ordered by Created Date so recent problems would be near the top.
That way, I'd have found the duplicate from a few hours earlier, assuming its author didn't bother to search, and from there would have got to the three-week-old bug with the fix.