I've noticed that no one seems to be responding to this one. I've been watching to see if there were any ideas. Personally, I found the find dialog to be much too limited. It works sort of like a phone book, you have to know what you are looking for before you can search.

I had to create a new class that replaces the codemine find class. I have a demo for that class and at one time was thinking of marketing it. But, I really didnt receive any response, so I just forgot about it. If you'd like to look at the demo, just email me direclty and I'll send you a link.

The class allows you to search on any field, not just indexed ones.
It allows you to do a "CONTAINS" search, which is what your looking for.
It allows you to refine sets and subsets of searches.
It allows you to export sets of data.
the grid sorts by header clicks, columns remember orders & sizes, reads long field names from the database....
Has many more features, evolved over 3 years of use.