I rarely use the Spotlight or Start Menu keyboard searching because of stuff like this. If it doesn't reliably produce the right result each time if you only type a small amount of the name - which it doesn't - what's the point?

(Call me crazy, but because of this I've come to not mind the basic Windows 8 start screen. It's not as good as the classic start menu, but compared to the Windows 7 one you can at least arrange it for quick access to a larger number of programs.)