I would also point at the really weird way the search works. (Related discussion here: Should you be able to use the catologue number to find an album? )
In that thread I was picking up on how an undocumented random selection of characters need to be dropped from the search strings. Yet there is nothing that tells you this. If characters like dashes in a cat no are ignored then they should be removed as part of the search. i.e. you must search for “FRED123” if you want to find “FRED-123”. Very unnatural.
The noob as to know a bit too much about the way the database is structured here. If they want to do a quick search, the drop down box is not very nice for them. Noobs don’t know what works or release groups are.
Look at Discogs. You can throw ANYTHING into that search box and it chases for a match. Track title, album title, artist, barcode, catno - it doesn’t care. THAT is noob friendly.
If the search gives too many answers, you can then swap to their advanced search. Much clearer boxes put up onto the screen to fill in.
IMHO the search here at MB is just too geeky and too tied to database knowledge. It would be nice to lay a more noob friendly search over the top of this. MB is not really an accessible place.