Funny... I'm a little new here and was just reading about how the janitors have to clean up really bad node titles to make them sensible and searchable. Faced with (very roughly) similar issues in handling the differences between what “regular folks” and “professionals” call things in the world of public libraries, we also employ trained database janitors to mind our metadata.

Perhaps what the OP really wants (better context for programming newbies, is my guess) might best be implemented as a new kind of metadata for all nodes? I'm not suggesting this is needed or easy to do (in fact I know it could come only through considerable ongoing effort), but imagine a clickable thingy other than Reply that would allow privileged monks to add controlled keywords and subject phrases to a node (and perhaps even an abstract) to make it more searchable. Controlled metadata, edited by pros, usually beats the pants off of keyword searching, at least for data sets of nontrivial size.

Then again perhaps accurate titles and other existing navigational features really are totally sufficient in the PM environment. I'm finding everything that I need, anyway, and the point raised about real newbs not even knowing how to search in the first place is ceratainly valid too. I guess the bottom line in my view is that the ability to ask a monk for help any time day or night pretty much obviates the need to go to great lengths to cater to newbies in the search interface.