This is posted here first to discuss any sort of issues that could be present in the text, and to get clear direction for another piece that would describe searching through roleplays.
Big shout-out to Cressy, since she used her editorial knowledge to clean initial mess I made and to make all important parts of the text stand out more.
So, yes, discussion! Anything you find is wrong, hard to read, not explained properly and the like - please do tell.

How do I search profiles?

Introduction

On some pages, you'll see search boxes in the upper-right-hand corner underneath the primary navigation region. These can be used to search a given section of the site for things related to that section. Search boxes can be utilized in two ways:

• Name Search, where typing a full or partial name will return all profiles that contain or match the entered characters. For example, going to Profiles and typing in "wrecked av" will return the profile of the site's owner, Wrecked Avent.
• Query Search, where typing a search-phrase can return very specific results. Each query search must start with the keyword find. We'll cover search syntax below.

Please note that for any kind of search, only the first 20 results will be shown, sorted from the most recently-active to least recently-active.

Profile Searching

One of the things you'll surely want to do is to search for potential Roleplay partners - this is where profile Traits, Preferences, and Interests come into play. Each of them can be incorporated into the Query search, allowing us to narrow your results to only who or what you really want.
To start searching for profiles, you need to type the keywords find profiles. This is the base of our query, which you can refine in several ways by adding additional specifications. Let's look at some examples:

By Profile Traits

You can search for all profiles that have a specific value for a profile Trait:

1. find profiles with age of teenager This will fetch you some teenagers. This query asks for a Trait of a profile, age in this case, to have a certain 'value', teenager in this case. But you can shorten it:
2. find teenager profiles with body build of lean This will give us a very similar result, but you can shorten this, too!
3. find lean, teenager profiles You can narrow your results by as many Traits as you want, separating them with a ,.
4. find profiles with body build of lean, age of teenager As you can see, you can use the long-form of a query to search for multiple Traits just as well. Why would you want to do that? Another example will give you some insight.
5. find male profiles This looks like it is a shortened form for locating sex of male, but not exactly! You see, there are several Traits that can have the value of 'Male' -- Traits such as Mental Gender, Secondary Sexual Characteristics and Sex. Thus, if you write a query like this, the system will fetch the first 20 profiles that have any of these Traits equal to male, which includes females that have a mental gender of male, and vice versa. For more accurate searches, use a query that specifies which of the applicable Traits should have a value of male, like this: find profiles with mental gender of male
6. find lean, teenager profiles with mental gender of male Now, armed with this knowledge, you can construct a search which mixes short- and long-forms to help you achieve exactly what you want.

By Profile Trait Preferences

Another handy thing to do is to search for character profiles that would be interested in your character profile based on its traits:

1. find profiles who like mental gender of female
2. find profiles who like females We shortened it, just like when searching for the traits of a character profile. This means you'll also lose some accuracy: just as with male, female can be the value of several traits. This query searches for profiles who have any Trait preference, or like, of female. (Incidentally, you can substitute females with female and the search engine will still understand.)
3. find profiles that like females Same as above: that and who are interchangeable.
4. find profiles who like humans, mental gender of female This example illustrates both the ability to search by more preferences as well as mixing short- and long-form queries. Please note that human is ambiguous; it is used in multiple traits, both Species and Genital Type. For more specific results, it is best to qualify your query with the longer form.

By Profile Interests

You can also search by the Interests expressed by a profile:

1. find profiles into cuddling This will return a list of people who have cuddle as an interest, regardless of their giving/taking setting. But what if you prefer to be cuddled?
2. find profiles into giving cuddling Now you will only find partners who would like to cuddle you, because they will Give this Interest (either Give Only or Will Give or Take). Searching for people who would prefer to Take the Interest is pretty similar:
3. find profiles into taking cuddling Again this returns a list of profiles marked with either Take Only or Will Give or Take.
4. find profiles into switching cuddling This is the last variant. Switching searches for people who declared that they would both Give or Take this Interest. Switching can be replaced with either giving or taking if you prefer.
5. find profiles into giving cuddling, romance, switching ear play This query illustrates how you can combine any number of Interests in your search, specifying their giving/taking/switching individually.
6. As a closing point for this part, please note that specifying giving/taking in a query excludes profiles that have marked the interest as N/A, so use into without specifying giving/taking for Interests that are likely to be marked N/A by many users.

By Activity

You can search by recent activity:

1. find profiles online recently This is most basic query related to a profile's activity. It will narrow your search to people who were online in the last 15 minutes.
2. find profiles online since 15 minutes ago This is the way to write it in the longer form, which permits specifying the time more precisely.
3. find profiles online since 5 hours ago You can search for activity in longer periods of time, like hours or days.
4. find profiles online since 3 days ago Days are the longest unit of time you can use in your searches.

By Canon

You can locate profiles that are linked to a specific Canon:

1. find profiles part of TERA This will list profiles that are linked to a specific canon defined in the system. For convenience, you can use several variations:
2. find profiles part of the TERA canon
3. find profiles part of the TERA universe You can use universe interchangeably with canon.
4. find profiles part of TERA universe This is the same as above, but you can skip the at will.

Combine!

We will cover only one example here, but it will show where the real power of search engine lies. If you take all that we established in the previous sections, you are capable of running quite detailed searches that will look like this:

find lean, teenager profiles with mental gender of male who like species of human, mental gender of female into giving cuddling, romance, switching ear play part of TERA online since 1 day ago

Now that is impressive, isn't it? Your query could be even bigger. You can always refine and add new search terms while searching, tinkering with what you write there will produce more-relevant profiles and remove the less-compatible ones.

A note on constructing big queries - think of parts that contain terms for Traits (long-form), Interests, Preferences, Canon and Activity as blocks; you can place them in any order, In our example above we did [traits][interests][preferences][canon][activity], but [activity][preferences][canon][traits][interests] is also valid. If you feel especially messy, you can break your blocks into smaller ones. While it makes it harder to figure out what is what, it also makes adding terms somewhat easier; you can just stick them at the very end of the query, finishing with something like this:

find lean profiles into cuddling, who like mental gender of female, into romance, with age of teenager online recently

Not as pretty, but still achieves the goals.