Both something like starred or -starred in order only search over starred items or exclude starred items explicity would be very helpful for me as well.
Use Case: When I am trying to organize a topic, my first step is to star notes that might be relevant for the topic. I often do this by a variety of consecutive searches. Obviously, in the later searches I do not want to have notes in the results that I have already starred. Later on, when, after having enough notes, I use search to start orienting myself within the selection. Here, I only want to engage with the starred notes.
In addition to the argument that it is redundant functionality to tag the selection of notes with #star, it also very tedious to manually tag - let’s say - 20-50 notes since we do not have bulk tagging of many notes at the same time.
+1 for this. Would be nice if starred status were surfaced in the Obsidian API, too, because then other plugins (i.e. Dataview) could work their own magic on that subset of files.