Is it just me or does the search find a very limited set of rants for everyone? Maybe it finds only the most recent ones?

Not you

Yup. Never finds what you're looking for

Search never works as it should. It is like well-working search is outlawed and punishable by torture till death.
Search almost always finds any of the entered words instead of all.
When the things to search for have titles and bodies, you normally can't search for a title only.
When the things have attributes most of the users would certainly want to filter by, there normally is no way to do so or it is nerfed int uselessness.

DevRant does something new: It just doesn't index all rants. This is a new low not seen before.

Yeah, the search is flawed.

I really want @dfox to open source this platform. I would still pay a monthly subscription, as I’m sure most users would. but I’m also sure I could reduce the cost overhead so it runs at less of a deficit, or at least fix some of the minor bugs.

And it’s even more annoying on iOS. The devrant app is often crashing when you open a rant. Then you want to find that rant by searching for the first few words. You scroll endlessly through the search results and never find the rant again. 😥