Those are actually the defaults for the BBS software itself. Normally, Paul does change them every time he upgrades the software.

However, recently, you may remember the BBS was crashing a whole bunch, right around the time of the last upgrade. One of the things he tried to prevent the crashes was to reduce the database overhead, and one of the ways of reducing the overhead is to reduce the scope of the searches. It was one of his diagnostic steps to leave those settings at the defaults.

I agree that the search screen should default to the largest scope in order to be most useful to new users. Perhaps Paul will decide that it's OK to put it back now that the BBS seems to have settled down?