Unfortunately, this board's search facility is a bit flaky.
I used to do the same as you, but instead of searching for the word 'the', I searched for the letter 'e', as it's the most common in the english language. This picks up almost everything.
However, I recently noticed that if you click on a user's profile there is a provision on the screen to list all of that person's most recent posts. I can't believe I didn't spot this earlier.