Stop using tail -f (mostly)
This _almost_ touches on the useful part of this:
If you search in less and then put it in follow mode, it continues to highlight the search terms. This is very useful for trapping an exception or webcall in the wild.<p>The downside: 
less buffers and tail -f prints directly. On a slow printing log this can cause events to show up slowly, and can cause performance issues on a fast moving log.
If you're piping through a script for processing, tail -f is still the best bet. If you need multiple files, multitail is probably better.
less +F hits a quick+easy operational niche and is available almost everywhere (whereas multitail is not).