Seriously, I _believe_ (IOW, this is speculation on my part) the reason is that forum searches are limited to a maximum number of hits.
Nah, no speculation. I am being really thick today it seems.
The limit is 500, but it works counterintuitive when you sort the result 'backwards' from new to old (as the search seem to be adding hits from oldest post to newest post).
It was in deed 500, it 1000 now ( but that doesn't realy help much )
As you pointed out, the word "Method" is likely a "popular" word in this forum and reporting all the hits would result in many pages.
Indeed. And you can solve it by limiting the message age number.
Indeed, for example limiting your result to the past 100 days gives a lot of results for this year
Hopefully, one of the forum administrators can confirm my "theory" and "adjust" it as necessary.
I consider this part of my issue as being solved due to stupidity and thickness from OP 
I thank you again for the feedback and sorry to have been wasting time with such such simple things that I seem to be failing to grasp.
At least I took some time if there was something to tweak. But there isn't much to tweak.
Marc