Hey everyone,
Progress! We now have the long awaited new search backend up and running for testing on Wikidata. It will still need some tweaking but please do try it and give feedback. It is running in parallel to the old one. You will need to visit a special page to use it: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=athens&button=&title=Spe... Please let me know about any issues you can still find with it so this so we can soon make it the default.
Thanks to Chad and Katie for working on this.
Cheers Lydia