The public web service API expose several domain specific searches that often become critical in identifying one specific object or a group of objects with common criteria.   A standard methodology has been adopted across the different web service domains and the \\\$searchStr URL parameter can be used in a search.  If you are like me, one particular challenge is that if you enter a name, revision, or any other indexed information you will get any and all results back from the index making it difficult to pinpoint specific objects.  That was until I discovered (thanks to a GREAT post from @AN) that the \\\$searchStr supports the index's User Query Language (UQL)!

I have summarized a few examples that @AN provided below but as you can see by leveraging UQL we can now get much more precise and complex search results back from the public search APIs.  

UQL Documentation

NOTE: In the samples provided below, because \\\$searchStr is a URL parameter it must be URI encoded.  Tools like Postman can do this for you pretty easily and most programming languages have a helper function to accomplish this as well.