So I want to know if there is a way to group tags starting with ~. Like let's say I want to see posts of two characters by using ~'s, but I also want to have mutiple different genre's of porn in the same search. If I used ~ for all the tags, I would get results unrelated to the two characters or posts of either of the characters with nothing to do with the gernes I searched for. Is there a way to separate them out so this isn't an issue?

Nope, there's currently no such feature. Occasionally, there's clever situational ways to work around it, but more generally speaking, you'd probably need to split it into two separate searches: genre1 ~character1 ~character2 and genre2 ~character1 ~character2.

I started working on a way to do searches like that a while back, using the database export. Is there enough interest in this kind of thing? I stopped primarily due to the large amount of space and setup time for indexing (over a minute), but after setup searches took less than a second.
That was primarily an excuse to learn to work with various database libraries, though.

scth said:
I stopped primarily due to the large amount of space and setup time for indexing (over a minute), but after setup searches took less than a second.

See I thought it would ne as simple as being able to group them into sets with parenthesis and have it be able to pick at least one item per set. Like if I had ~(lopunny cinderace) ~(fetish-A fetish_B), it would show posts with at least one of each set.

crocogator said:
Nope, there's currently no such feature. Occasionally, there's clever situational ways to work around it, but more generally speaking, you'd probably need to split it into two separate searches: genre1 ~character1 ~character2 and genre2 ~character1 ~character2.

But how can you combine two searches into one? (my interpretation of your method is that i need to have two browsers open)

2021stillcovid said:
But how can you combine two searches into one? (my interpretation of your method is that i need to have two browsers open)

You can't. By "split into two separate searches", I meant that you can't search for both at the same time.

2021stillcovid said:
But how can you combine two searches into one? (my interpretation of your method is that i need to have two browsers open)

Well you can use your blacklist as an advanced search.

~(genre1 ~char1 ~char2) ~(genre2 ~char3 ~char4)
is the same as [-(genre1 AND -char1 AND -char2)] AND [-(genre2 AND -char3 AND -char4)] AND [-(-genre1 AND -genre2)] AND [-(-char1 AND -char2 AND -char3 AND -char4)]

which you can represent in the blacklist as
genre1 -char1 -char2 genre2 -char3 -char4 -genre1 -genre2

Third line narrows posts down to genre1 or genre2. If it's genre1, it'll be blacklisted if it doesn't have char1 or char2; if it's genre2, it'll be blacklisted if it doesn't have char3 or char4.

But if you just want to search (genre1 ~character1 ~character2) OR (genre2 ~character1 ~character2)
Then putting the following in the blacklist
-genre1 -genre2 -character1 -character2
is fully sufficient.

snpthecat said:

Well you can use your blacklist as an advanced search.
[..]

This kind of search algebra is cool but it just makes me think that e621 should have more options built in for .. 'ordering within individual pages' (essentially ordering that could be done client-side, so no additional load would be placed on the server.).

Dividing a search into 2 partitions is one example. Sorting the results overall by score (order:score) and then, within each page, by age, would be another.