Add search option for down voted posts

Question

I would like to have the option to search for down voted questions and answers.

Why?

Searching for down voted posts will help to improve posts with low quality and flag/delete unrelated posts and spam.

how?

add a search option similar to votes:5.

votes:-1 selecting all posts with a negative score.

votes:-2 selecting all posts with a score of -2 or lower.

and so on.

As mentioned here it is not possible to search for down voted questions. This can be done by a workaround but only if the result set is smaller than 5.000 questions.

Answer 1

In the next build the range operator gets expanded a bit, supporting this. You'll be able to query any range operator:

• score/votes (synonym)
• views
• answers

in a few ways, for example:

• score:4 (score >= 4)
• score:3..4 (3 to 4)
• score:3-4 (3 to 4)
• score:-3-4 (-3 to 4)
• score:-3--4 (-3 to -4)
• score:..0 (score <= 0) < relevant!
• score:..4 (score <= 4)

We're pretty much allowing all the combinations that are sane to parse here, the relevant one above would allow you to search for negatively scored questions in a query.

Answer 2

Well... essentially you can get to these results without this functionality... All you have to do is execute a search term and sort the results by votes by clicking on the votes tab from the search results. After that you can simply use the pagination at the bottom of the screen to skip to the last page of results. Here you will find negative score posts.

An example for a search on the php tag would be this -

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php?page=6090&sort=votes

Keep in mind that there will be many posts there that are already closed.

Searching for posts solely on the basis of negative scores might not be as productive as you think because you would be presented with results from all tags. Using the method I mentioned above, you'll be able to get at the posts which are most interesting to you (beyond the fact that they have been down voted).