Why excluding subtags in search is not possible?

Hi,
I have just now noticed, that it is not possible to exclude subtag alone in search (e.g. -#*/test), as opposed to excluding subtag paired with explicit tag (e.g. -#new/test), or searching for that subtag (#*/test) which is both possible.

I am not sure if this behavior is since the beginning of advanced search in Bear or just in Bear 2.0, but I would like to see reason why it is so.

I have just needed this search. It can be convenient with some tag structures. (e.g. when you name your subtags iso-structurally, like #articles/new, #audio/new, #video/new and you want to filter out new subtag, thus viewing only old “media”.

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This was one of my suggestions a year ago. At the time, search improvements were on hold until after the B2 release. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more search improvements.

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Would you get the result you’re looking for by omitting the # mark? So ‘-“articles/new”’ etc.

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Your example should work in many cases, but it’s targeting text and not tags specifically. This would be an issue for dates. For example, if I want to exclude the date tag “/11/01” then -“/11/01” will exclude any note with that date formatted as text in addition to the date tag.

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Gotcha. I use a pinned tag “#journal/“ for the top of a date structure, so I could get around it with -“journal/11/01”. But to the original point, it would still be helpful to have subtag filtering.

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you can exclude tag-subtag pair (which you suggest), but my question is about excluding only subtag (#*/new, not #audio/new, which IS possible to exclude). Using -"/new" would probably be the closest solution so far. But still, it can filter erroneously on some other text (not tags), e.g. part of some web pages can have exactly this string etc.

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