"Partial find" problem

[George F. Greene]

In browse, in find, I have always been able to type any string of characters from a single character to the limit and I get results (unless there's no record with the search string). No operators needed. Now it only works a little. What I mean is this:

I want to search for the string "meetup" which is in a field I use for URLs (the full value of the URL field I'm looking for is "http://www.meetup.com"). Because I wanna just search part rather than all of a URL. 'Cause I'm lazy.

• I enter "m", I get 56 records -none of which are the Meetup URL (!)
  
• I enter "me" I get one: https://members.cafepress.com -but no http://www.meetup.com (!!?)
  
• I enter "mee", or "meet, or "meetu" or "meetup" and I get the error "no records match the search criteria" (?!*$#)
  
• I type in "www.m" I get the record in the found set of URLs -as I do with "www.meetup.com" or the full URL "http://www.meetup.com" which both obviously get me the one record.
  

Now, I'm showing the search terms in quotes above and to answer the question I know is coming, yes I tried all the above finds with and without quotes with identical results. Finds in other fields seem to work as expected, so is it something funky with URLs; the periods or slashes maybe that's tripping up the find? I looked in operators but neither the period or forward slash are operators and they're not in the find I'm doing anyway, they're just in the field's value in the records.

[comment]

The default find (i.e. with no operators) is for 'words that start with ...'.

There is no word that starts with "me" in "http://www.meetup.com" - the string "www.meetup.com" is a single word.

To find "http://www.meetup.com" by using "me" as the search string, you need to use *me* as the criteria.