Benjamin KalishResponding to Elizabeths reply:
While I think that the mess in your screen shot is absolutely to be avoided—I think that allowing complex searches to be initiated and edited without using the advanced search screen is essential. We do have a problem in the catalog now where search grammar is added to the search box unnecessarily, resulting in redundancy between the grammar and the dropdowns or even in the grammar itself (why do we ever end up with “author:author:author:Smith”?)
In the particular case of an isbn search, it would be great if this displayed with just the isbn in the search box and with ISBN in the dropdown, but we would first have to add ISBN to the dropdown. It’s not currently an option. And we need the more general case for searches like title:sea author:verne.