ayg wrote:

An unusual first character such as ! or, I don't know, γ (on, say, enwiki) can return meaningful results without a second one being provided.

Agreed; consider also CJK, where one Unicode character may carry significantly more information.

candrews wrote:

I agree with paul irish that searching shouldn't start until the 2nd character is entered into the search box, but I do see the point about CJK. Perhaps a solution like the following filter being run on the client side would work:

if (query.length >=2 && ! query.match(/[A-Za-z]/))

That would still execute the search after the first character for CJK languages, greek characters, !'s, and all those other non-Latin letters.

ayg wrote:

I think you meant || there, not &&.