alt Hacker NewsCtrl+r is great, sometimes. History saving sucks which can make using it difficult, but i usually use it out of laziness than trying to recall a command, especially with ssh or repeated iterations requiring flipping between two settings/states. Its hard to rely on it for other things, but its still super useful.
I use history | grep quite a lot, because of the non-fuzziness with default ctrl+r. If I know exactly what the substring is, then that's great, but sometimes I also want to see the sequence around the command too (e.g. two step processes like eval ssh agent + ssh add key)