The filter/search in previous iTunes worked on a word-based matching system. If each of the words matched anywhere in the song info (title, artist, genre, etc) then a song was returned. It appears that the new default in iTunes 11 is for it to be a phrase-based match.
This breaks searching as far as I'm concerned. For example, there's no longer any way to search by artist and genre. If I have an artist with a bunch of different genres and I want to listen to a subset I'm not unable to do this. Example: "sufjan christmas" used to bring back all my Sufjan Stevens Christmas music. Now it brings back nothing because nothing has the phrase "sufjan christmas" in it.
Is there a way to revert to the old method of filtering?