Currently on Special:Search on Wikidata, only the search in the main namespace and property namespace is enabled by default.
As a user looking for a Lexeme (or Form or Sense) if I type the word I look for in the search field, I find nothing. I need to change manually the namespace of the search, or add Lexeme: or L: as a prefix. This is not very intuitive for users, especially new users.
Looking by default for items and Lexemes should be allowed in Special:Search and the search bar.
This is tricky since Lexeme and Item use different search queries (due to the fact that they have different structure).
Alternatives are:
Let's discuss it with the team then and see how hard is it to do option 2. Since we're using similar searches, we probably can assume (or make it so) that the scores are comparable, at least when we're talking about Wikidata searches.
Would it be acceptable to show the results for Item namespace and Lexeme namespace separately - e.g. in separate tabs? If not, what would be the expected UI - would both kinds of results displayed together with distinction only by prefix or with some separation between Lexemes and Items?
Closing out low/est priority tasks over 6 months old with no activity within last 6 months in order to clean out the backlog of tickets we will not be addressing in the near term. Please feel free to reopen if you think a ticket is important, but bare in mind that given current priorities and resourcing, it is unlikely for the Search team to pick up these tasks for the indefinite future. We hope that the requested changes have either been addressed by or made irrelevant by work the team has done or is doing -- e.g. upgrading Elasticsearch to a newer version will solve various ES-related problems -- or will be subsumed by future work in a more generalized way.