User blog comment:Daniel Baran/Search Developments: Big Picture/@comment-188432-20120511214532/@comment-188432-20120514182101

Well, I wish I could remember the precise behavior. But as I recall, there was a tab that said "advanced" and if you clicked on that you could had to then actively choose to select all the namespaces. I know i never, ever saw a search where all the boxes were ticked unless I clicked "select all namespaces" (or whatever that tick box was labelled).

You may well be right that there were tabs at the bottom, and that one of these was labelled "everything" and that when you clicked it, all namespaces were lit up. But, being on the bottom, it was never prominent. Now, that's the only place you can go to select specific namespaces, so it's a totally different experience. It's much more laborious to define a search if you have to start from everything being checked, than if you start from only the default namespaces being checked. Most users will, I fear, not bother with unchecking stuff and they'll just give up.

And to be honest with you, that's basically fine. As I've said elsewhere I do want people to search the wiki broadly. I'm not actually advocating a return to the "old" way. But somehow I've gotta keep the Howling out of it, as is made clear in this promise to the tardis community.

Surely there's some little flag somewhere that we can change at tardis to make this one namespace not be a part of the definition of "everything". Would changing the definition of  be a possible solution?

(As for the namespaces in the default search, I'll take your advice and go the Special:Contact route.)