What happened to the (thorough) search feature?

Question

It no longer functions properly; I don't know how it worked under Leopard since I only used that for about a week before going to SL, but it functioned well under Tiger.
As an example, I indicated in the Spotlight Preferences that I did not want it to search Mail Messages, Contacts, Events, Images, etc, etc (the only things marked are Applications, System Prefs, Documents, and Folders). There is no option to select hard drive, system, etc.
In the resulting window, it also doesn't seem to matter if I choose to search "this mac" or "macintosh HD" or "contents" or "file name" - it just doesn't do a real search.
I searched for one of my third party applications by the developer's name (which is used in their preference file). The only things I got were the applications (there are several) and a slew of Mail messages (which I didn't want). Unlike Tiger, it did not show anything under Library/Application Support or Preferences and I know there are files/folders in both.
When I search, I usually do it because I need to uninstall and want to make sure I removed all the files - I do not care to see meaningless results in Movies, Fonts, Music, etc. But I do need to see where all the files are.
Unless there is a way I can get a fully functioning search function back, I'm about ready to abort Snow Leopard; I'm already annoyed enough about having to control click on all of my folders in the dock just to open them in list view. That's why I never used Leopard - I thought they would have included an option to do so by now.....but that's a topic for another thread.

Answer 1

Thanks for all the input - will try to address all:
Even if Spotlight is instantaneous, it is of no help if it only does a cursory, superficial, and therefore totally useless search. Apple had it right in Tiger, so there is no logical reason to drop it (except to dumbify it). I will send some feedback on this.
I had tried a search in Finder, but obviously did not see the drop down menus (probably because I was not expecting them). Anyway, I repeated my same search after following V.K.'s instructions and, voila, all of them showed up. But - again - in Tiger I just opened a finder window and typed the name in the search field and it worked; now I have to set certain parameters first. Annoying. But, thanks to you, at least I can get it to work ...