Recent years have witnessed the development of a large body of algorithms for community detection in complex networks. Most of them are based upon the optimization of objective functions, among which modularity is the most common, though a number of alternatives have been suggested in the scientific literature. We present here an effective general search strategy for the optimization of various objective functions for community detection purposes. When applied to modularity, on both real-world and synthetic networks, our search strategy substantially outperforms the best existing algorithms in terms of final scores of the objective function. In terms of execution time for modularity optimization this approach also outperforms most of the alternatives present in literature with the exception of fastest but usually less efficient greedy algorithms. The networks of up to 30000 nodes can be analyzed in time spans ranging from minutes to a few hours on average workstations, making our approach readily applicable to tasks not limited by strict time constraints but requiring the quality of partitioning to be as high as possible. Some examples are presented in order to demonstrate how this quality could be affected by even relatively small changes in the modularity score stressing the importance of optimization accuracy.