Knowing that the search uses whole words is helpful. Searching on segments would be useful when, as I was, you try to find members who have more than one email address. I hoped I might get a match on a first name that appeared in more than one address and deduce that it was actually the same user.
For a service desk application that I developed, I wrote a whole set of search modules for searching the log. Second level support used it quite a bit and my dev team used it for looking for optimizations but the first level support manager banned it among her analysts-- she claimed, rightly I suppose, that first level should not go into that much detail.
Marvin Waschke