Comment 6 for bug 1164016

One more point. When the Nautilus designers replaced type-ahead find with search-as-you-type, their intention was that searching as you type would be really fast because Nautilus would use Tracker to search. See, for example, the comment https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680118#c4 : "Nautilus will build with a Tracker dependency by default unless
--disable-tracker is used. That is strongly not recommended. Search is going to kind of suck without it."

Because Ubuntu does not use Tracker, searching as you type in Nautilus is especially painful on Ubuntu, and so the removal of type-ahead find affects Ubuntu users especially acutely.

So in Ubuntu we could enable Tracker, which would alleviate the problem somewhat, and/or patch type-ahead find back in. I lean toward the patch: it's probably really easy. But I agree with Alfredo that finding some solution to this should have more than a Low importance.