Right now, we have a bunch of places and ways to browse and search the database. There's the main search on https://beta.musicbrainz.org/search , a tag lookup, a whole bunch of different fields to look up identifiers, all the browse pages on https://beta.musicbrainz.org/browse , the top CD stubs page https://beta.musicbrainz.org/cdstub/browse , the tags page https://beta.musicbrainz.org/tags ...

I think it would be much better if we could combine most of those into a single browsing and searching interface which is filterable - that would also let people explore the database more without having to first learn the advanced syntax and then come up with an idea of what to search for.

A simple experiment I made a year or two ago now is at http://mbsandbox.org/~nikki/browseartists/ which is a wrapper around the webservice search, it's not complicated code either. The search field can be used like the existing search field in advanced mode, where you can type advanced syntax, you can also paste certain things such as MBIDs and IPIs and it will just recognise them, and you can also use the filters instead of having to manually type in the advanced syntax. You can also combine the three, although obviously if you create nonsensical combinations, you won't get any results.

That was just an experiment, there were other things I would have liked to add, for example I also wanted to make it default to showing recently updated things to start with, but that bit isn't currently possible, I'd like to be able to sort things too (also not possible), and I thought it'd be really nice if it could automatically detect valid advanced syntax and automatically escape things which aren't valid.

Something like this (particularly the last updated bits) might also be a way of reimplementing parts of MBS-161 too.