Normally, the Advanced Search feature is going to result much more efficient than the default search, although you have to play around with the parameters a bit. For example, since @piggy’s bot stopped working (I know that there are other available alternatives), this is how I use the Search function to locate references to me:
That delimits the scope of the searches to the last five days, sorting by the most recent entry.
A few things to consider:
- Very recent references take a while to be indexed and displayed when using the search function. This means that the most recent references will need a few minutes (or longer) to display in the search results.
- If you seek terms that are rather popular (i.e. scam), and leave the default 0..9999 day interval, the results displayed will be oldish. This happens when there are many results, and it is best to either refine the search further, or delimit the date range to say the last 300 days.
- Delimiting the boards can also be pretty handy.
- When I can’t find a specific post of mine (or someone else’s), delimiting "by user" tends to do the trick.
- I tend to leave a search tab open for days. Sometimes it loses it’s search context when refreshing the result screen, and displays something totally unrelated. If this happens, go back to the Advanced Search parameter screen, change something, and search again (bear in mind that the default Search Order may be reset back "Most relevant topic first", which I normally change back to "Most recent topic first").
