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How to Search with Multiple Tags?

There are two basic ways to search for questions with specific tags:

Search Box

Simply type the tag you're looking for inside square brackets. You can search for questions with multiple tags and/or search for other terms within those tags.

A simple example search looks like:

[python] [beginner] tutorials

That searches for the term 'tutorials' within the set of questions tagged with both [python] and [beginner].

If you wish to do a text-search for a term that is also a tag, or for a phrase that contains common words, you may need to escape the text term by surrounding it entirely with double quotes. Multiple text-search terms can be specified if necessary.


URL Location Bar

You can specify the tags to search for in the URL Location bar in the following format:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/apples oranges

This way is more powerful because you can also specify operators like 'or' or 'not'. The Search Box method defaults all searching to AND.

To search for questions with one tag OR another tag:

tagged/apples or oranges

To search for questions with one tag but NOT another tag:

tagged/apples -oranges

Note that a search cannot begin with a NOT, and any such leading NOT will be removed from the search.

To search for questions with tags that match a wildcard pattern:

tagged/apples~

These options can be mixed and matched as you see fit.

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  • I don't know when this changed, but the [c#] works for me without escaping. I assume it's been fixed since October. I don't have enough rep to edit, can someone change it?
    – mtruesdell
    Commented Apr 9, 2009 at 18:15
  • "or" and not in the search box would be useful, consistent, easy for you ?
    – Anonymous
    Commented Nov 11, 2009 at 10:32
  • 1
    I'm not sure if I should create a new question for this, but I can't find a way to search for tags with Boolean OR. What I want is: [ms-access-2007] OR ([ms] AND [access]) OR [jet] OR [ms-jet-ace] but when I put that in, it treats it exclusively as a Boolean AND, with the result that I get an empty result set (as no posts have that combination of tags. I monitor Access-related questions on a daily basis, and instead of having to do multiple searches, I'd rather have a single search that's a UNION of all the individual searches. Can someone point me to instructions for how to do this?
    – David-W-Fenton
    Commented Apr 26, 2010 at 23:20
  • @david Searching for [ms-access-2007] [jet] [ms-jet-ace] will do an OR for all of those tags.
    – jjnguy
    Commented Apr 27, 2010 at 1:38
  • 2
    No, it doesn't. It returns an empty resultset (I've tested on 3 different browsers, all with exactly the same result). And, of course, that's not the query I was wanting to run. I also tested that the individual queries returned results, as well.
    – David-W-Fenton
    Commented Apr 27, 2010 at 2:22
  • @david, sorry, I don't know what to tell you then.
    – jjnguy
    Commented Apr 27, 2010 at 4:11
  • 2
    @david: The search box defaults to AND. I think this got changed at some point, as there seems to be a lot of references to it defaulting to OR, which is currently incorrect. You can still do an OR by putting OR instead of + in the URL directly. Like so I tried to get your query in the search, but I don't think it supports nesting -- however, since [ms] + [access] currently has zero questions, you could just use [access] instead.
    – Jon Seigel
    Commented Apr 27, 2010 at 12:59
  • @Jon Thanks for the clarification. I don't search much myself. I was just going off of what was in all of the posts about it.
    – jjnguy
    Commented Apr 27, 2010 at 15:01
  • Thanks @Jon Seigel. This works: stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ms-jet-ace or jet or ms-access-2007 . Searching for just [access] is useless, as the tag is used for a lot of things not related to MS Access. Indeed, it seems to me to be a completely useless tag in its unqualified form, but people do use it. I think a lot of people don't really understand how they should tag their questions, but that's reality and we have to deal with things as they are, not how we'd wish them to be.
    – David-W-Fenton
    Commented Apr 27, 2010 at 23:57
  • ATTENTION!!! Does not work unlogged in! meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243960/…
    – Smit Johnth
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 13:16
  • It seems like it would be useful, when considering whether to burninate a tag, to see the list of questions that are only tagged with that tag (and no others). Is this possible using a search query?
    – Kyle Strand
    Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 17:53
  • 1
    Is there a way to search within posts of a certain user?
    – Royi
    Commented Jul 8, 2017 at 18:54
  • For "anything but a specific tag" (i.e. how to start with a NOT) I found this to work but not sure: [*] - [specific-tag].
    – ypercubeᵀᴹ
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 at 13:36
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There seems to be an undocumented (so far) use of the search box. Searching for questions tagged with one tag or another. I'm writing it down here instead of putting it in the current answer since what I write here might not be "official". If it's good enough, then by all means, move it up there.

Search box

To search for questions with one tag OR another tag:

[apples] [or] [oranges]

or

[apples] or [oranges]

To search for questions with one tag but NOT another tag:

[apples] -[oranges]

Note that these searches may be combined to perform more complex searches:

[functional-programming] -[ocaml] [or] [c] [c++]

This searches for questions tagged excluding or both and .

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  • 3
    Is it possible to define precedence with parentheses? E.g. ( [functional-programming] -[ocaml] ) [or] ( [c] [c++] ) vs. [functional-programming] -( [ocaml] [or] [c] [c++] ) ?
    – ypercubeᵀᴹ
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 at 13:33
  • Also: for "anything but a specific tag" I found this to work but not sure: [*] - [specific-tag].
    – ypercubeᵀᴹ
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 at 13:35
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On Stack Overflow (only, ATM) there is a new advanced search option: collective.

Example usage: collective:"Go Language"

Example usage: collective:"Google Cloud"

Additional search terms will apply to further filter the results from those URLs.

In addition to accepted answers such searches also feature recommended answers.

 

The command doesn't appear in Stack Overflow's full search help but it does appear in the search bar helper:

Search Bar Quick Help - describes a few commonly used search parameters and the new collective command, undocumented elsewhere

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Click on the "Tags" button near the top of the page. That takes you to a list of tags. The default list is the most popular tags, sorted in descending order of popularity. Another tab takes you to an alphabetized list of tags. Click on the tag name to get a list of questions associated with that tag.

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If you can see the tag you want, e.g. 'Perl' in a post on the screen, you can click on it.

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