Are there any plans in the future to better integrate searches and tag structures? For example, if you search for "Sherlock Holmes/John Watson" bondage, my understanding is you won't find fics tagged with, say "Sherlock Holmes/John Watson" and also "ankle cuffs", even though "ankle cuffs" is a subtag of "bondage" -- the author has to use both the more specific subtag and the redundant metatag to show up in search results.
The three search fields listed in this post hook into our data for text matches, and are as such unaware of the tagging structure behind the words. If you tell the search engine to give you results for "bondage", it can't know that you also mean ankle cuffs and rope and chains. It will just give you all instances of "bondage" it finds.
However, you can use the options in the tag filters or the search form that ask for tag input. These will take the tagging structure into account. For your example, I would go to the Sherlock Holmes/John Watson tag and then type "Bondage" into the 'Other Tags' field (since it's unlikely that it's among the Top 10 freeform tags) (I still checked, though). There's an autocomplete that offers me tags containing the word bondage as I type, but I went with just the main tag. The result is works tagged "Sherlock Holmes/John Watson" AND "Bondage" or any of its syns or subtags. If you scroll down a bit, there's a work tagged "Handcuffs" but not "Bondage", and several tagged "Light Bondage".
For most searches, the existing options and ticky boxes will be more than enough! This post was just to show what you can already do with some fiddling and poking, even though we don't have visible NOT or OR options yet (i.e. no ticky boxes to exclude certain things, or to show works that are either Mature or Explicit). Hope my explanations made sense! Let me know if not and I'll try to clarify in the next post. :-)
Comment on The "Search Within Results" Field and You, Pt. 1
Account Deleted Mon 16 Sep 2013 07:30AM UTC
Last Edited Mon 16 Sep 2013 07:32AM UTC
Comment Actions
AO3_Support (Official) Mon 16 Sep 2013 10:22AM UTC
Comment Actions
Account Deleted Mon 16 Sep 2013 10:18PM UTC
Comment Actions