Following are some tips which may help improve your search.

• If the phrase or words you're searching for are too common (ie, "the" or "and" are common words, "need help" is a common phrase) then you won't get any meaningful results. Try changing your word choices to something less common.
Special characters:
• [ ] By default when no special characters are specified all words are considered optional. This means one or more of your words may be returned, but not necessarily all of them.
• [+] Placing a plus sign at the beginning of a word indicates that this word must be present in each result returned.
• [-] Placing a minus sign at the beginning of a word indicates that this word must NOT be present in each result returned.
• [*] An asterisk acts as a wildcard and may be appended to a word (placed at the end) to match a partial word with multiple possible endings. For example: app* will match apple, applet, etc.
• ["] Placing double quotes around a phrase indicates that the entire phrase must be found.
• You may use the following form if you would like to narrow your search to posts made by a specific user.
• Specifying a user without any search keywords will return all threads which contain posts made by that user.
• Specifying an invalid username will default to a normal search.
• User searches return posts from newest to oldest in descending order and attempt to take you to the exact portion of the page where your result was found, whereas normal searches return posts based on the relevance of the keywords supplied and simply link you to main thread.