Comment 12 for bug 752259

Let me chime in here, as apps lens maintainer who did this original behavior, although I don't make calls for design.

The current behavior is very much intentional for many reasons.

 1) I am quite sure that 99.9% of the non-geeks in my social circles would be utterly confused about the perceived random matching (which I admit, i was myself for several months with Do)

 2) I believe it is important that we have the same matching for installed apps as we do for those we find in the Software Center catalog (in Apps Availabale for Download). And in fact, also the same mathcing criteria for files. Doing sub-pattern matching like described on massive corpora like the S-C catalog or the entire files index is not feasible, nor would it provide sensible results.

 3) I don't buy the argument that it is easier to type "sp" than it is to type "syn". That's a matter of muscle memory. And isn't it even easier to hit <super>-N where N is the offset of the launcher item?

 4) Experts can easily uninstall the default apps lens an install a custom apps lens that has the desired behavior (given that some writes it first of course ;-))