@Jeruba we built search to deliver the most likely results in the first 6 or so hits. The likelihood of the sought-after question being in the other 359,994 goes down exponentially with every 10 less relevant results. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in those hits, it’s just that, if the question or answer can’t be found in the first 6 hits, maybe it’s time to modify your search terms. That’s how most people search on Google, so we adopted that for the Fluther search.
I think your getting the mechanics right, but maybe it’s viewing the actual results that’s confusing. I used Auggie’s same search terms above (@whatthefluther lost walk) and discovered the question you were looking for as the 7th result. The question’s title is, “Where is the best place you have ever gotten lost?”, which only contains the word “lost” of the words you tried (“lost”, “foreign”, “city”). The answer he left that you so enjoyed contains many more words, the most distinct of which are “Istanbul”, “Turkish”, “wheelchair”, “spinal tap”, and possibly “cigarillo”. In fact, a search for ”@whatthefluther istanbul” pulls his answer up as the fourth hit, ”@whatthefluther spinal tap” the third hit.
One thing that may not be clear is that the search box in the upper-right corner of each page only searches for questions, and you are interested in finding only an answer. Clicking the “Search for…” item at the bottom of the drop-down list will bring you to the full-fledged search page that will show you both questions and answers that match your search criteria.
Hope this helps and happy searching.