Currently it is possible to search observations for specific words in the description or tags on the Explore page, and it is possible to search through all the comments on the website from here. Those work sufficiently for very specific terms, or if I know that I wrote the comments in question, but not for more vague terms. For example, I was able to search for “four-leaf” and variants of that in comments and descriptions to find observations for this project fairly easily. However, I don’t think there’s any way currently to search for observations of cicadas with “female” in the comments? That ability could be useful. Perhaps even the Description / Tags field could just be changed to Description / Tags / Comments.
Also unrelated but I’m not sure if this request has been included in this thread yet: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/sort-the-species-tab-by-higher-level-taxa/3043