> Half of our customers barely know how to operate a computer, and are
> utterly baffled by our product. They just want a big black box with a
> massive "find the file I need" button in the middle. (Because, you know,
> software is telepathic.) And then the *other* half of our customers want
> more and more sophisticated searching capabilities. People have asked
> for stuff like regex searching and a search predicate builder wizard.

You mean your search engine code can't automatically detect when a regex 
is entered in the box? :-D

> Wanna take guesses how a person who barely knows what a "file" is will
> react to a "regular expression engine"?

Google has made it very hard for everyone else doing search. People are 
used to just bashing in any words (not even spelt correctly) and getting 
matching results. If your search engine is any worse than Google people 
will complain it doesn't work, therefore people will complain it doesn't 
work.

Our PLM system here has that problem. People expect to be able to type 
in a name of a person or document or project and get results. No, it's 
an old-school search engine where you must type in *exactly* the text 
(or use * wildcards) *and* which field you want it to look in. Then 
build up an expression with AND and OR and brackets. Typing in "Joe 
Bloggs pump drawing" obviously gives no results, you need to type 
something very awkward like "'created by'='Bloggs, Joe' AND 
type='Drawing' AND name='*pump*'". Unless you are very familiar with the 
system you are shafted.

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