I tried searching for "Template:non-existent template", but I didn't get a link for creating the page.
Topic on Talk:Search/Old/status/Flow
Agreed. This has caused me to turn the feature off. Is there some other way of creating a page that I'm missing? The documentation seems to hide it so that they aren't flooded with bad articles.
No, it's just disabled when keywords contain (apparently) hyphens or colons, to avoid creating pages like writer prefix:Federico. It needs to be tweaked a bit.
Filed as 62055 and set to "high" priority so we'll pick it up in the next few days. The idea was to stop it asking you if you want to create a page containing search syntax. It'd be silly to make a page called "intitle:yummy incategory:cake chocolate" but it certainly isn't silly to make a page with a dash in the title.