Idea:
Enhance the Special Page: Search by an advanced parameters form, and improve the way how to configure namespaces.

Board: Tickets for the AdvancedSearch extension are filed to the Advanced-Search project.
**Info page*: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/AdvancedSearch

Current status
AdvancedSearch is a beta feature on de-wiki, ar-wiki, fa-wiki and hu-wiki. It is expected to be a beta on all wikis by May 2018

Research
P5464 Search syntax usage May 10-20, 2017
Keyword usage on advancedSearch wikis: dashboard

We also started off with a prototype, which is not that similar to the current project anymore.

General info about the birth of this project
In addition to the wishlist survey, WMDE & people from dewiki were organizing a topic-specific workshop by end of 2016 whose results we want to realize.

The workshop serie on advanced search took place in 3 different cities between September - November 2016. About 40 people participated.

In the workshop we wanted to learn about specific search queries we can do by using existing keywords like "incategory", "intitle" "deepcat" or "filetype". These keywords are currently only listed on help pages of cirrus search, and not easy to find. Most people - no matter if they are Wikipedia beginners or longterm editors - don't know about these keywords and how to use them.

As a first step we created a "search mapping" by connecting desired search queries of the participants with existing keywords. Like this it became visible which keywords are the most useful, and which keywords are useful for very specific cases only. As a second step, we were collecting and designing ideas how those keywords could be made accessible in the advanced search field.

Based on the workshop results, WMDE is planning to technically implement a way to access the keywords via the advanced search field, starting in the first quarter of 2017. The task might also contain a (limited) restructuring of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search and making it easier to find the special search page in the first place.

Outcome of the workshop:

• Search is already very powerful, but noone knows about it - from Wikipedia beginners to longterm Wikipedians, not many people are aware of keywords such as intitle, incategory, filetype ... and know where to find and how to use them.
• Users often don't know how to open the advanced search field in the first place and that the current solution is ambiguous (see also: phab:T141244). Proposals to improve that were: Provide a seperate button to open the advanced search field or link to the advanced search field from the tools panel on the left side.
• By mapping desired search queries with the existing keywords it became clear that most of the things people wanted to find can already be queried with the help of the search parameters.
• People designed several ideas for an advanced search field and how an integration of those keywords could look like.
• Based on those ideas we start to create a first prototype (currently only available on German and for German Wikipedia) to have a basis for discussion. Main aspects of the prototype currently are:
  • Extra button to open the advanced search field next to the search field
  • An advanced search interface that does not require the knowledge of the precise keywords (e.g: "title should contain _____" instead of: "intitle")
  • Bi-directional synchronisation between the search field and the advanced search interface: The query is displayed with the correct keywords in the search field and vice versa, so that people can learn about the keywords

For more details, please see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Advanced_Search_Workshop