[Someone1234]

Windows tried to do that with their search (in Vista, 7, and 8). It has been a disaster. Hidden functionality is a UI and UX anti-pattern.

How do people know to type "bm:" for Bookmarks? Google? Is a Google search now part of the UI's workflow? Or will people simply stop using Bookmarks because it is so obscure (you're seeing this with mobile browsers, Bookmarks are hidden so go unutilised).

Ditto with Windows. In Windows 9x you had a nice UI for search that allowed the user to: Search file/folder names, search within (contents), and to filter by file type and file date(s). In Windows Vista+ it is now hidden strings like "filetype:" (and that is the least obscure example, try doing the between-dates thing WITHOUT googling how first). Plus now "unknown file types" cannot be search within at all (even if you alter the indexer's settings it no longer works, you have to add each file type in the registry as a "text file").

[magicalist]

I kind of agree, though hidden powerful features aren't inherently an anti-pattern (see, e.g. keyboard shortcuts). You just need to provide affordances for everyone to be able to use an interface at some useful level.

I'm a fan of the style of gmail's advanced search (for example), which has all the various fields to fill in if you drop it down, but then when you execute the search, it converts them into the search operators, thus teaching you how to use them (if you care enough to pay attention...if not, the field boxes are still there for you to use).

[frik]

Windows Vista had the advanced search bar, the UI offered similar search options that were available in Windows (95-XP).

Vista advanced search: http://www.mydigitallife.info/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/vis...

Win95: http://toastytech.com/guis/win95find.png ; WinXP: http://www.adammathes.com/academic/search-engines/desktop/xp... ; Win2k: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/features/sea...

The major difference was that Vista (Longhorn) originally was meant to be powered by WinFS and Vista shipped just with Windows Search (the indexing service that was also available for WinXP as "Desktop Search").

For some unknown reasons the advanced search bar is absent in Windows 7+.

[marcosdumay]

That history is funny. Win95 was also supposed to ship with WinFS, but instead it got only a "you don't ask for a find-like tool anymore" search window.

I don't know if MS finished the WinFS specification already.

[smarterchild]

> Hidden functionality is a UI and UX anti-pattern

I suppose the entire terminal, by that argument, is an anti-pattern. I feel a little better about not ever getting past mediocre in shell. :)