Have you told your waiter?
Seriously it bugs me too. I get the whole wildcard thing but the thing is, the asterisk is BEFORE everything you type so if you just happily type away in the box, it searches for an exact match of “*seach” (or whatever word or words you typed in there).
Which of course never matches any criteria. As was pointed out upthread, the asterisk should be AFTER the term(s) being searched to be a real wildcard. At least as far as I understand it.
It’s annoying to delete it. It’s tricky every time. And to put the cursor before the asterisk is also a challenge, because the default (when you click on the text field to enter text to search for) puts the cursor after the asterisk so you have to either delete it or re-position the cursor before it. Especially on a smartphone it’s a challenge.
Pinging John Robinson for this feedback opportunity. If/when the next release comes out.
I’m not sure if it is working as intended. It is supposed to act as sort of an in-site url or command line, search for do:pings and it’ll pull up your pings. The default text is a demo of the “command” that brings up that page. It should clear when it initially gains focus with the default text, and it ideally should have an accesskey to give it focus, I was on a mouse-free kick once... Whether or not any of that is actually coded is another matter (!) (I may have accidentally broken it at one time.)
The idea is questionable, it’s what happens when coders are in charge of user-interface design lol. I’ll probably make the text go away since it’s more trouble than it’s worth.