User blog comment:Dopp/Updates to How We Search/@comment-4126310-20120427211300

I appreciate the thought behind the changes, but they've made a lot of things more difficult and counter-intuitive especially for new users whose only exposure to wikis is probably wikipedia. You really should reconsider, offer wikis the choice whether they want this or not, or use the idea that has already been mentioned in the comments to split the search button into "I want to search" and "I want to be taken to the page closest to what I'm typing in".

The search is also broken and doesn't always work. That may be old news, but I never had occasion to notice that. If I type a page name in normally, wait for the dropdown to appear, and then ignore the dropdown and hit enter, I sometimes get "There were no results matching the query." I have to search for the exact same thing a second time, and then I get the desired result. That's fine for me because I know the page I'm looking for exists, but a new user would not know that, give up and leave the wiki.

Redirects/shortcuts don't appear at all in the dropdown, which is obviously terrible because the point of the shortcuts is usually so I don't have to type as much. Redirects with radically different names than the page they redirect to do not appear in the search results, just the page they point to, which can be a problem for new users who may not know the "proper" name for the thing they're looking for.