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I would like to know if there is an intelligent program that helps find packages in the repositories. I mean a program that uses intelligent algorithms or that has an advanced search engine where yo can specify the words/phrases you want and/or don't want to appear in the name, brief description or long description of the package.

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Ahhhhh.... Good (?) old days....

The program you are searching for is called Synaptic Package Manager.

It was the default application for downloading packages for Ubuntu till 10.04 if my memory is right.

You can install it through the Ubuntu Software Center.

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They took Synaptic too??? I bet for nothing better... No, I know synaptic, so I was asking for something more powerful; but from your answer it seems that the current flows in the opposite direction... jajaja – Robert Vila Nov 8 '12 at 23:50
jajajaja :) :)... – hakermania Nov 10 '12 at 0:19
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I generally just use apt-cache search on the command line and pipe the output through grep to include or exclude terms. An example:

apt-cache search google| grep dev | grep -v proto

While this isn't smart, it is powerful, since both apt-cache and grep support full regexps.

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Thank you, that's what I normally do but, leaving aside that there are options in aptitude not mentioned in the man pages, sometimes I want something more powerful. The repository is getting too big. – Robert Vila Nov 8 '12 at 23:53

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