The search function on SA is pretty bad. Some points:

It isn't smart about substrings. For instance, searching for "dance" in profile text won't find "dances", even though dance is a subset of dances.

It doesn't do wildcards. For those who don't know a wildcard is a special character, often "*" that matches any character.

Multiple word, like student loans are treated as a single string "student loans".

No booleans, ie, nothing like searching for college AND(loan OR dancer)

Some things that -are- helpful in searches are to put simple strings in the profile text, once you've set up all the filters you like for body type, lifestyle, age, etc:

NSA
no strings attached
loans
bills
tonight
rent
open minded

And I'm sure you gents can suggest others, and add other search tips.