On March 18th , Vivien said on Discord that there are plans to optimize the search feature. But after that, they had the whole scandal with Live patching and affecting subsequent game installs, I remember it was a rought time for devs trying to offer support to all the people having issues with the game. Then they had to switch to NF, for technical reasons that people always seem to forget. So my guess is, along with live patching, whatever progress they had in creating a different search feature was probably made useless and they had to start from scratch (if they ever did restart working on it). Not really an answer, just adding info to the subject.
In previous threads i was always arguing against such a feature i am quite sure it would heavily increase the prices for high-UT items for classes that need it (assassins and hybrids), since marketplayers can MUCH more easily buy up stocks and hoard/relist them as they wish.
That said though, the way i am currently progressed into the game (aka rich and settled) i would have no problem personally with such a function...and the whole server itself has changed a lot concerning the still active population. The damand to get temps done isn't as high as 6months ago anymore, and cornering a complete accessory-slot would be much harder now (i think?)
You could use one of the fields that allows you to select a minimum value and turn it into a Utility check in multiples of 10
For example when you search for 'Power' you're able to choose a minimum amount from 1 to 17 or so which returns all items with at least the amount of power you select or higher
Replacing power with utility and having the numeric value denote multiples of 10 lets you prune low utilities from a search '11' would return utilities 110 and above '9' would return utilities 90 and above '5' would return utilities 50 and above etc
A flag to include a range of only +9 to your search could be set by one of the ToA bonuses that doesn't get used in this ruleset So Power 9, HitsCap search returns 90-99 Utility items
If I remember right the only fields that let you select a number are Resists, Power, and Hits though
In that case 2 ToA bonuses can be designated as flags to use a Utility search The first ToA bonus enables searching for Utility with any of the numbered stat fields (resists, power) in multiples of 10 or Hits as is (12,16,20,44,80, etc) and only establishes a minimum The second ToA bonus enables searching for Utility with the same conditions as above in addition to capping the range at +9 Searching without either flag functions as it normally would
Hits 44, Hitscap would return all items with Utility 44 and above Hits 44, Acuitycap would return all items with Utility 44 to 53 Hits 44 would returns items with at least 44 hits, and searching Hits 44, Acuity would return items with at least 44 hits and 1 acuity as it is not using the flag
I don't remember all the ToA bonuses or the order they appear in market search so Hitscap and Acuitycap are just placeholders for the sake of demonstration With most +Skill bonus being lumped together under All Magic and All Melee there may be a fee unused that could be used as flags instead to permit searching for a stat alongside utility, such as Mauler bar and Fist Wraps