Maybe the users wanted to put down on “paper” with what they wanted to search so they would not forget it while they thought up a search criteria.
I like more applications that are wizard-like than applications that give you a complex but general form to fill up. The more steps a user function has, the more I want a wizard to it. Users might not have used to multipurpose search-fields, so they want a redundant combo box to it - even if there is only one simple field in it. Also that way they know what are the search options. They could not search with for example the employees pet’s name.
I want my application to be easy to use. I dont want to look a bit of information from here and a bit from there and then go through this and that window to get a general form where I need to fill few and only few fields but remember not to fill the third field while I need to check five other field’s data. Instead I want all the stuff in that function to a wizard or better into one window without everything that I don’t need in that function.
I don’t think google’s advanced search screen is particularly easy to use.
There is also the other side of the coin. If you give a user one field to rule them all they may actually be afraid to put anything in it in case they think they need some arcane formatting or something. “But it doesn’t say anything about telephone numbers, how will it know to look for a telephone number?”
Google has also put thousands and thousands of hours of analysis and development into their search tools. There is no way you can compete with that unless you can use existing frameworks. Apparently the latest version of XCode/Interface Builder lets you put drop search/filter fields into your apps that will behave like Apple’s own, but I haven’t had the chance to use it myself yet. It’s really only a matter of time until that sort of thing is in all GUI toolkits.
Google search and application search not the same. Google is trolling the internet and indexing public known sites. Additionally it is applying relevance to each site (ranking). Basically it is indexing content.
Your appliation is probably stored in a database or file system or both. So a universal full text search is not feasible because the application is more than just content.
I would just listen to your users and ask them how they would find stuff in the application and build out search appropriately.
Google’s image search is one service that is not working as I wish it would. Sometimes it shows pictures I was looking for, but many times not. For example if I want to look pictures of space monsters, I search space monster. But at least the first page shows pretty crappy space monsters.