Not only should we have a search system for players, but the information should be incorporated into other things in the game as well, like friend lists and the linkshell menu.

I think it's ridiculous that in order to tell what classes my friends are and what ranks they're currently at I have to either ask them all or pull up their Lodestone profile out of the game. If the Lodestone can update every so often with all that information outside of the game I don't see how it could be so hard to periodically poll the server for some of it inside the game (like FFXI does) for a search function.