What is the proposed idea/solution?
Right now when you search for a linked record, only exact results are returned. This means if I have a record titled "Texas State Fair - 2024 - Food", I cannot quickly grab that record by searching "Texas 2024" or "2024 food" because it's not exactly titled that way. I would have to type it all out, including hyphens, and if I had a lot of "Texas State Fair - 2024 - ###" records I'm going to have to look through them all every single time.
How does is solve the user problems?
Allowing a more relaxed search, semi-fuzzy of sorts, allows faster searching using the details a user remembers. It's very common to have the primary field of a table be a CONCAT formula to gather multiple pieces of data from a record (especially since you can only search for a linked record using that primary field and nothing else). By allowing less precise searches you can make it easier to find results, and there's nothing stopping a user from still being as exact as possible to further narrow down the results if they want. By loosing the tight restrictions, both types of search can still take place, but in the current design you can only use exact.
How was this validated?
Heavy use of linked records across multiple bases, and no ability to quickly search through thousands of records effectively to find the one I want unless I know its exact name in the primary field.
Who is the target audience?
Any Airtable user who has a base with linked records, especially if the base is large.
