My use case: 

I have some automations to help with Q&A moderation, often using an API call to Get the question’s meta data (ex. check if it has received a reply yet / check if marked as answered yet, etc). 

API calls referencing trashed topics (understandably) fail. When I go to check the error, I’ll grab the topic’s title and search for it in control. When it’s not there, I go to the trash can to confirm it’s been trashed… and that’s when it gets hard to confirm my hypothesis (that it failed due to trashed topic). 

Hi @DannyPancratz ! Thanks for posting your idea! Just to understand, why do you need to search on trash posts? To then restore them? I’ll leave the idea open for now to see if other community members find it useful for their purpose. Thanks!

BIG +1! I have a use case similar to Danny’s - we might identify a post through external analytics that’s of interest to us, then want to restore it. My most recent example of this comes from a request to thoroughly audit and analyze bug reports for our products that come in via our community. Many of these have been deleted over time, but we’re finding that searching for the trashed post specifically to review it is very difficult. 

My workflow:

1. Download an export of "Topic" data from Analytics within control.
2. Find posts that I am interested in and note that "Status" is Trashed.
3. Attempt to open the post from the URL and receive the public facing 404 error message, "page not found." This is expected and intended, but I can’t access it in the backend by switching to Control. 
4. Search for the post by name in Content Overview. No results found.

At this point, I decided to try locating the posts directly within the Trash folder, which we have not emptied since the launch of our community, so it should be comprehensive. However, it's not reasonable for me to scroll through hundreds of posts page by page to find it.