The search box on the wikidata repository is not very useful, as it only suggests page titles (i.e. Q12345), see bug 43020. Usually, people use that box to quickly go to a specific item - so, what is wanted is really an item selector. Which we already have.
The search box could be replaced by an item selector with a little bit of special sauce: if the quick lookup for a matching item fails, it should take the user to Special:Search for a full text search. Similarly, searching for the mepty string should take the user to Special:Search.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement