[rcxdude]

I second this. For some things the search is adequate, for a lot of things it's still quite painful, and it's largely an issue of both coming up with an appropriate structure for the database (which has to represent a huge number of different kinds of components with different parameters and different means of specification) and then actually maintaining the quality of the contents of such database to a level where it is actually useful (it's annoying when an incorrect part shows up because of a typo, misinterpretation of a datasheet, or misclassification of a part, and it's even worse when a part doesn't show up for the same reasons). For another example, noise performance on analog components can be specified in multiple different ways, and different manufacturers or even different parts from the same manufacturer may use different means. Generally these can be converted for a useful comparison, but the people maintaining digikey's database do not have the time or necessarily the skills to actually work this out, and so it's easy to miss the best part when you search because the value isn't even populated.

Finding parts is still the slowest and most critical part of a PCB design, and it's especially difficult for a beginner because it's hard to even know what you might want to look for. Even with years of experience I can find myself spending days just trying to find the right keyword or set of different keywords for some functionality or another, and the search is pretty dang useless for this (maybe it is something which LLMs could help with: parsing and understanding a gigantic database of datasheets which I could query by saying "I want a part that does this that and the other, with specs like so. What part or combination of parts can do this?").