Currently, the search functionality only searches for one type of object. Clearly, searching in all objects (like Google does) would be the best solution, yet I understand, this is somewhat difficult wrt technical support. However, in the current implementation, I keep hitting the wrong search button (having to go back and try again), or I hit enter, which generally does the wrong query (search for authors). Therefore, an improvement and technical compromise would be to do searches for all types of objects on a single user query. Results can then be presented in a Mac Spotlight kind of way.

Submitted by Sander Vermolen on 11 May 2010 at 10:55

New search functionality will be implemented in WebDSL, enabling search on multiple facets in researchr (like author, publication, bibliography etc). It is expected to be implemented in the second half of 2011 (part of my master project).
An idea to improve the current search is to display the top X (3?) matches for each facet when doing a global search with a link to extend the list for each facet.