Before the new nav, it was possible to use the search box to require some tags and exclude others. Typing something like [included-tag] -[excluded-tag]
would bring up results that included and excluded the respective tags. Here's an example on ELL, which was made with the search [word-request] -[phrase-request]
.
In the new nav, typing only tags in the search area ignores the -
modifier. So typing [master] -[slave]
is somehow reinterpreted into [master] [slave]
(notice the negation -
is now gone). In order to work around this, I have to include some extra non-tag search criteria. A search like [master] -[slave] is:question
seems to work as intended. But if you remove the is:question
from the search box (or the url) it fails to handle the tags properly.
Please fix the new tag behavior to support the old tag-exclusion behavior without having to resort to weird workarounds.
This question is a more detailed version of this related feature request.