[reverend]

You could still have one type of search going on monthly. But when you have enough free mages and gems, those can be used to manually search other provinces. The monthly spell still tells you its target so you can adjust your other searches.

It's kind of like an indexing service on a computer. Usually run in the background, slow but steady with little use of resources, but when needed, just activate it and put some more CPU time to it. It just depends. If you want results quickly, you have to micromanage. If just want results, let the mages do it themselves.