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.

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.