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Few people want to do a site wide search and the ones who do will press the input box on the top left. No one expects that ctrl-f will open a site wide search, everyone expects a page search.

If you still want to enable this ctrl-f to enable the site wide search, I suggest making it opt in with the checkbox. It's really obnoxious to have to disable the checkbox.

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Agree that for new traffic like HN, and maybe on our essays generally, it's a bit jarring. We'll tweak these settings a bit.

This search interface has been a huge hit with our regular users, but it's harder to get feedback from fly-by traffic, so this is really helpful.

If regular users find it helpful, maybe advertise this as an opt-in feature?

To be honest, the non-standard behaviour plus strange looking popup confused me. I didn't even notice the tiny checkbox, nor that you could press CTRL+F again to get the standard search behaviour. My mistake, of course, but this speaks of poor UX in my opinion...

FWIW, we got the idea from Stripe's API docs[1]. Not that Stripe is above reproach, but they sure are good at this stuff.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/api

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