No, this isn’t new. We’ve had this for a while as a feature, if you are in a topic, a category, a tag or your PMs, you would previously see a checkbox to search in that specific context. What is new is that the checkbox has been replaced with a “keyword in this topic” row.
This is a legitimate complaint. I worked on this change to search and I very much expected this to be raised as an issue. As @Don points out just above, you can hit Enter to search all topics. You can also use up/down arrows to navigate the available search results, so for a search in the current topic you would need to hit Arrow Down + Enter.
We are well aware this is not an easy adjustment especially for existing heavy users of search, it’s difficult to adjust to the change because it feels much slower. But we made this change for a few reasons:
- Better performance: launching a full search of all posts on every keystroke is expensive, the added friction to users comes with a big advantage for site managers. This might not have a lot of repercussions for self-hosters managing one site, but over many, many Discourse instances, the savings can be noticeable.
- Simpler list of results: previously we had multiple columns in this search dropdown with the topic results on the left, and category/tag/user/group results on the right. That didn’t look great, there was a lot of different types of elements visible all at the same time.
- Search as navigation: With the new changes, it is very quick to go to a specific category/tag/group/user without leaving the keyboard. For example, you can easily type part of a tag/category’s name and then use Arrow Down + Enter to navigate to that tag/category page. (Previously, this took many key presses.)
- Support for search history: this hasn’t been implemented yet, but we plan to add this soon, for authenticated users only, of course.
So, hopefully the search feels good after a short period of adjustment. That is our goal, but sometimes it’s hard to make changes without causing at least some friction.
Do you mean the a shortcut isn’t working to add a search result to a topic? It works for me, although there is a regression (will fix shortly): it posts a relative URL in the composer, where previously it was an absolute URL.