After researching the Vanilla forums looks like others are asking for mre advanced searching features.   I think our hands are tied using Vanilla at this point.  Oh well  I did find this.

How Searching Works in Vanilla

Vanilla 2 uses MySQL's FullText Search by default. PROS of FullText Search

• FullText Search allows for relevance ranking, which can be very valuable when your forum has a lot of content.
• FullText Search is much faster than a basic "LIKE" search on this type of forum.
• FullText Search does not require any additional modules to be loaded by your web server, and will work out-of-the-box on *most* systems.

CONS of FullText Search

• On starter forums with little-or-no content, the FullText search fails to return results unless you use special characters (ie. Try putting a "+" symbol before your search terms).
• On massive forums, this type of search is slow and just doesn't find relevant enough results, and you need a true search engine back-end.

We chose to go ahead with MySQL FullText Search for Vanilla 2 because for the vast majority of communities, it does the job well. If you have a small forum with very little content and you are not getting appropriate search results (or any at all), please keep in mind that (a) you can improve your search by using the "+" symbol before your search keywords, and (b) most likely all of your content is viewable from the discussion list already, and a search might not be necessary until you get more content. For deeper, developer-centric information about MySQL Full Text Searches, check out MySQL's documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html