Sometimes I am looking for an old post of mine, over a year old or so, usually as reference for some new forums thread, but also sometimes to try to remember how I did something.
I always seem to have troubles. I do not have such troubles using "Advanced Search" for more recent posts.

Simplified example 1 (and not the actual post I was looking for this time):

Keyword(s): "RFC1918" with Search Titles Only.
User Name: "Doug S" with exact match enabled. (or not enabled, it doesn't seem to matter)
Other stuff is all default.
"Search now" gives 0 results.

O.K. try again, however leave out the User Name.
"Search now" gives one result. ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hlight=RFC1918 )

Notes: I used a very rare search term for this example. More typically one needs the user name match to reduce the number of "hits" to some reasonable number.

Simplified example 2:

User Name: "Doug S" with exact match enabled.
Find posts: "A Year Ago" "and Older"
Other stuff default or blank.
"Search now" gives 0 results.

User Name: "Doug S" with exact match NOT enabled.
Find posts: "A Year Ago" "and Older"
Other stuff default or blank.
"Search now" gives 1 results. ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1113903 ) ( Doug Shaver )