Since learning that master plus cards exist and are blank and that search cards are the only way to do searches, I've been wondering if there's a way to set permissions on certain cards such that only admin-level access will see them in search results. Is there?
Un-useful search results rather ruins what I've set out to do, so having blank master plus cards show up isn't good. And if I'm putting together queries to be included in other places where they are useful, then finding the just the query is not only confusing it's duplicating results.
The direct answer is yes, if only admin can read it, then it will only show up for admin. So you can achieve this with permissions.
But it's usually better to fix this with a more precise search. I think by "master plus cards", you mean cards with simple names that happen to be used as right names in plus cards, right? If you want all the cards that end in "+address" for example, then you can use {"right":"address"}, and it won't return the simple "address" card.
I can't require users to put a more precise search in the search bar at the top of the site, though.
So it turns out that I *can* hide master plus cards in search results, but if I do that and they're part of a query, the query won't return anything. So if I hide Directed by and Written By as Read: Admin, even thought that rule isn't applied to +directed by and +written by, the query that gathers information from those two places will only return results to an Admin. So users will potentially get these blank cards as search results, which is less than ideal. This seems to only apply to searching, though. I have Claws set to Read: Admin, but Anyone can still view Werewolves+Claws just fine.