Agreed. Why let you select what type of society you want to set up and then not allow people to search it on that basis. Even worse still, if you manually look at a society you can't even find out the type it's supposed to be. So basically you're flying blind.
Some of the stuff with this release is an absolute joke. The sheer level of fail on so many aspects should be embarrassing to the game developers. I'm amazed by how many people just ignore it, or insist on pointing out all the bits they like. There's loads that I like about the game and I'm enjoying it for the most part. But there's so much, so wrong with it that there's no logical reason to expect they have any intention of putting it right or making it better. And 'server issues' is no excuse for missing elements of a game, that are logically implied, or in some cases promised pre-release.