Hi, thank you for solving the "blocking" thread. And since I can see you are probably CirrusSearch developer (?), I'd like to show you my suggestion to the Community Wishlist Survey 2020. What do you think? I personally ran across to some cases where having ^ and $ anchors would have helped a lot.
Topic on User talk:TJones (WMF)
Thanks for contacting me! Yeah, I'm on the Search Platform team at WMF, so I do work with CirrusSearch and the underlying technology stack.
I think it makes a lot of sense for intitle searching, especially Wiktionary. I'm not sure about whole documents, but with the multiline option it could still be useful there. I've also run into some cases where it would have been helpful.
There are a couple of potential hold-ups. The Community Tech team, which sponsors the Community Wishlist may not have the skills needed to work on this project—though we (the Search Platform team) do look at the Community Wishlist, too, and see if there are promising projects there that we should take on. We don't follow the Community Wishlist timeline, though. Also, it might turn out to be too expensive in multiline mode on large WIkipedia docs on big wikis; I'm not sure, and I don't think it should be, but it's possible.
That said, I do think it's definitely worth proposing and discussing!