Searching - some note on how this searching works

The searching algorithm used here is the one used by PERL (regular expressions) which is a little different than what is used in most shells. Here are some notes that should help if you are not getting what you might expect.

Searches on NOT case sensitive.

The asterisk * character does not match everything. Instead it says to match the character immediately before it zero or more times. By itself the asterisk matches NOTHING! You can do things like this:
johns*on will match johnon, johnson, johnsssssssson and so on
it will not match johnston

The period or dot matches and SINGLE character (letter, space, anything) but just one per period.

Certain characters have special meanings like parentheses. If you want to search for an open paren use this the backslash to precede the paren: \(
This is a good way to find people who have changed their name and who have included that information when they signed up, though not guaranteed to be complete.

The carrot or up arrow ^ matches the very beginning of a string and the dollar sign $ matches the very end. So searching for john will match Joe Johnson and John Doe. Searching for ^john will find only John Doe, for example. And searching for son$ will match Joe Johnson but not John Doe.

You can also search for all last names that begin with the letters h through m using this:
using the "Find Last Name" option. Doing the same thing in the "Find Name" option will find only first names starting with the letters h through m.

The hyphen - by itself (not in the square brackets as above) is not a special character. However, you can find all the hyphened names (first and last) by searching for the hyphen character by itself.

These options can also be used in combination.

Notes on "fuzzy searching"