The idea is that accessing recent searches is mostly only useful when actually searching for something very recent, which means that it would show up at the top even if the query is empty or extremely short. If the user is typing a longer query, it likely means that what is at the top is not what is actually desired, so it's better to not take recent searches into account anymore. Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/113338