Odd--there is on mine, at the bottom of the page, labeled "Search".
Anyway, it's too much trouble to search any time you want to post something, just to avoid setting off the blowhards around here who get annoyed.
Downvotes don't have to indicate "I'm punishing this user", they can simply be "this comment is low-value".
You could easily bypass this, of course, but I don't think most people are trying to hack the front page, they just found something interesting and they're sharing it with us.
That doesn't prevent you from either posting the exact same URL once the original story has been purged from memory (probably after a couple of weeks) or posting a slightly different but completely equivalent URL. For example, IIRC the following are all counted as different URLs:
I imagine https:// would add eight more variants, but I haven't ever heard of anyone trying it in real life.
Cygwin is meant to be complete POSIX system, so GOW seems to be rather an alternative to MSYS from MinGW.