Ubuntu Software search functionality broken

All the graphical frontends I tried seem to fail to some extent... curiously, Gnome's and Ubuntu's Software Centers gave me no results, unlike you. I'm using Lubuntu 16.04, and you?

Anyway, I drew a simplistic comparison table for the searching features of some graphical & command line tools. The results may be 'qtcreator' for the actual IDE package; 'related', for packages related with the IDE or QT, like plugins, etc; and 'null' for a search with no results:

+-----------------+---------------------------+------------------------+
| PACKAGE MANAGER |      SEARCH TERM:         |      SEARCH TERM:      |
|    FRONTENDS    |      "qt creator"         |       "qtcreator"      |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|gnome-software   |            null           |          null          |GUI 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|ubuntu-software  |            null           |          null          |GUI
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|software-center  |         qtcreator         |        qtcreator       |GUI
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|lubuntu-software |         qtcreator         |        qtcreator       |GUI
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|synaptic         |          related          |   qtcreator, related   |GUI
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|aptitude         |    qtcreator, related     |   qtcreator, related   |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|apt-cache search |    qtcreator, related     |   qtcreator, related   |
+-----------------+---------------------------+------------------------+

Of the compared tools, only apt-cache and aptitude support regular expressions. Plus, you can do as you please with their output, just pipe it to any other processing tools you are comfortable with.

I thought Synaptic could make use of at least wildcards, since it uses Xapian, but this doesn't seem to work, not how I expected, nor could I find any reference to such a feature.

So once more, the console way proves itself, although I still use Synaptic for commodity reasons and some other neat features.

I'll keep looking for more info on the subject and update this answer.