Requested feature overview description.
Include more of the usual search operators. Currently; e621 supports AND (just searching the words); OR (~ operator); NOT (-); and wildcard (*). The other part of the suggestion is to make the search engine support more than just tags.
The Operator I am mainly talking about is grouping. Essentially, able to search ~(search 1) ~(search 2) where the tags of the 2 searches would otherwise produce unwanted results. eg; (~A ~B) (~C ~D) ( or(A OR B) AND (C OR D)) could not be done in a single search. In face, anything with more than 1 OR cannot be currently searched on e621. A good reference for the usage of operators is Google's supported operators (3rd party site). I know Google is a Fuzzy search engine and e621 is not, so some may not apply, and also that Google is probably worth a lot more then e621, but the basics are there.
The other part about not being just tags is a different. Particularly, right now using the OR operator on pools, sets, and relationships, will not work as the user likely intended. If A and B are a sets or pools; searching A B (or A AND B) will show what the sets/pools share; like the middle of a venn diagram. However, searching ~A ~B (or A OR B) will result in the "no results" message rather than everything included in both sets/pools.
Why would it be useful?
More specific searches enable users to use a single search instead of multiple searches.
Here is an example that will be used in this post:
Search 1 results: A, B, D, E, F Search 2 results: B, C, G, H Combined results: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H
A few advantages to doing this are:
- The ordering is kept. eg; Search 1 and 2 would result with C and D could not be ordered by the 2 searches when separate
- Avoidance of duplicates. Search 1 and 2 would both show B, whereas when combined it is only shown once.
- A single search allows users to only need one instance of the site open.
What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
The search parser and other search-related items. Also, the cheatsheet will need to be edited.
PS: Apologies if this suggestion was already posted in the past. I search the forum for things involving search, however for whatever reason it didn't show much actually involving search. Please include a link to the thread of the same thing if it is a duplicate.