Tag search NOT operator is broken

Question

Searching for "-[feature-request] [comments]" should return a list of questions that have the tag [comments] but not the tag [feature-request]. The right hand sidebar says that, but the search results are identical to "[feature-request] [comments]".

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As random points out, the operator works, but seems to be broken if a minus sign is the first tag in the resulting search URL. This is a problem because the system re-orders the tags when you put them into the search box, always putting the one with the minus sign first.

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Edit: Here's another behaviour that I haven't encountered until now. I was trying to pattern search for tags that contain 'array' but NOT include '-array', so I did the search like so. The resulting page shows the right tags with the right operators on them, but the results aren't being filtered properly (the first result includes [multidimensional-array]). So I simplified and did this (1,960 results), and then did this (1,963 results -- what??), which still included that first question with [multidimensional-array] on it. Something is not working right here.

Answer 1

We don't allow searches that begin with NOT aka -.

If you try to begin a search with a not, we will strip it out. Any term beyond the first one can be a not. (and yes, this means any not search must contain more than one term by definition, and that's intentional).

That said, the re-ordering of tags was an unintentional side effect of the parsing, so I have fixed that.

Answer 2

You'll have to reorder it so that the tags you want to exclude come last in the query.

Like so:

[comments] -[feature request]

As you've pointed out, no matter how you plug them into the search box, it will return them munged up and without the correct exclusion ordering.

So then you have to URL hack that up.

Is that intuitive? Who knows.

Pick up some milk on the way back.