I think this is somehow a summary of different issues I noticed while searching. Some of them I have already reported, but I have the impression that the underlying issue is the same.
The new part of this report is that searching from a tag or category page is also affected.
In all cases, when the search term starts with an operator for example @, #, or in:, the two options “search term or press enter” in the search function do not behave the same.
When you press enter, everything works as expected. However, when I click on the term, which is something I often do while using my tablet because the on-screen keyboard is close to the search bar, something unexpected is added.
topics
As reported in Search adds topic, when you are at a topic, the topic is added:
users
I already reported this issue in Search adds username. The username is added when you search while looking at a profile. That one was fixed, but it has broken again:
Example with `in:` and @
Since having more than one
@ doesn’t make sense in this case, the term is replaced entirely. This can be inferred because the search term is not displayed (it only says “or press Enter”), though this is still not what I would expect.
tags
But the same also happens when you look at all topics with a specific tag. Then, searching adds the tag.
In this case, the tag is not just added to the search term; it replaces the term entirely, similar to when a username is added and you were searching with “@”:
That reminds me of Autocomplete overrides first choice when searching for category + tag, or tag + tag, where the autocomplete of a tag also replaces the input.
categories
And it also happens at category pages:
Here the term is also replaced even though searching for a category and a tag works in general.
I hope this works as a general overview of the “clicking adds unwanted part to search term” bug. If that is the case, Search adds topic could be closed in favor of this one.
The issue where tags and categories are entirely replaced is probably better discussed in the existing topic Autocomplete overrides first choice when searching for category + tag, or tag + tag.