I'm glad to see that some effort is being made... I'm sorely disappointed because I've been somewhat irritated with the search functions since Alpha... There were times back on Alpha where I wanted to see if one of my friends was online, and I was pretty much stuck with "/t Lady Gaga You on?" every 5 minutes.

I miss all the old functions I could use search for in XI...

Inviting people....
Checking zones to see the current populations so I could thusly make an estimate as to what camps would be taken or how many people were participating in a certain event...
Checking to see if someone not on my friendlist (I only have 200 slots to work with, and I can't friend 2000 people) was online that was supposed to participate in an activity with me...

And the invite and search comment functions were greatly useful, though in all irony the comments were never used for what they were intended for. Great way of seeing who wants what from an event though. Which was another great thing FFXI search did; give a quick visual of who was after something in a certain event.

Also, while we're talking about invites, can we PLEASE at least invite people from inside a raid if they DC? I liked the system of Dynamis where at the very least in a raid like Dynamis, if someone left and needed to re-enter, the server kept a list of who had previously entered, locking all after the 64th name out. Or you could place a 30 second logout time in a raid, and put it back to the way you all had it before. It takes log enough to get back in after a DC.