Unfortunately, unrestricted searches generate way more hits than you can process by hand. I worked around this by applying subsets of search criteria at a time. For instance, instead of searching for an Atheist/Agnostic 25-35 making over $50k with an Average or Athletic body type who likes backpacking, exercises 3-4 times per week, and has a graduate degree, I would search for athletic Atheist/Agnostics making over $50k, then search for women with graduate degrees who like backpacking, then maybe widen the age range to 20-40 but apply the rest of the criteria, and so on. The challenge was to be as inclusive as possible without generating more hits than I wanted to process in one sitting.

It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.

Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.