Possibly somebody realized that search ought to be a premium feature. Chances are that would be working on a new "plan" that one'd need to subscribe to in order to use operators in search.

meta: please use the original title in submissions, especially if the original title contains more information than your edited one: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

article: "dumbing down" of search features seems to be a common pattern sadly. Especially for cases where it triggers notifications, like saved search on e.g. EBay, good filtering is great to find the interesting stuff. But apparently to few people use it to support it? Or is it a scale thing, complex queries being noticably more expensive to execute?