Who says I am not doing that? My argument was about ‘reading’ in general, which has little to do with the user’s experience.
You can easily just claim that and the next person claims the opposite, since it is all just fictional examples without data behind them. If I am on the Files index page (e.g. on the Marketplace here) and want to look for an app, I just type something in, search and I get file downloads as I will probably expect. But with “Everywhere” as a default, I might get thousands of forum posts, which just happen to include a word from the search phrase, especially with Elasticsearch which picks up almost everything. Those are likely not the expected results and will leave the user overwhelmed and frustrated and could “cost you a member”. Same thing. These fictional examples don’t favour one solution over another. That’s why I said in my first post that there isn’t the one perfect solution. We don’t just have to put ourselves in the shoes of average users, we also have to consider all their potential searches.
By the way: I could imagine a global search as default working very well *IF* the results page would offer a convincing way to narrow down the results dynamically, but at the moment it doesn’t do that and it won’t happen over night, so that option isn’t on the table when we just discuss the current search bar design.
That’s also why the comparisons with Google services don’t do much for me. Google invests millions in guessing the context of a search query and ranking the results accordingly. That is why it works so well. It’s not because the search is so wide, it’s because Google usually guesses correctly what you are actually interested in and which results might be helpful to you. So, in a sense, the results we are dealing with are actually rather narrow instead of wide. But we don’t have that luxury with the IPS search.