The behavior of conda search used to be that conda search X would show all packages whose name contained the string X. There was a -f flag to search for full names.

Now it seems you have to explicitly add * to either side of the string to do a partial name search.

I get that search now accepts a general package spec, but adding stars is annoying and unintuitive to beginner users. The most common desired behavior is to search for substrings. This is how the search functionality for every other package manager that I've used works (pip search, apt-cache search, yum search, brew search, fink list, cabal list, I'm sure you could find and try others)

I would suggest making search do a partial match search by default, as long as the search string doesn't include characters that would indicate it's a more general package spec. It can also use the -f flag, which was apparently kept but hidden from the help, to override this behavior.