Re: Tag search for all / any tags

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 04/10/06, Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com> wrote:
>> I think we need to make it easy for the user to decide whether each term
>> should be AND/OR and not try to guess which one they want.  I've added a
>> number of top level tags, and I wouldn't always want 'AND' to be used
>> across them.
>
> That's why I mentioned that the user could define the behaviour inside
> each top-level tag. Explaination below.

I don't think that's enough...   what I mean is that whether I use 
AND/OR has relatively little to do with the top-level category the tags 
are in.  I agree that it's probably *more* likely that AND is the right 
choice between top-level categories and OR within a category - but there 
are definitely times where that isn't the right choice - and it'd be 
nice if there's a way to get the opposite behaviour without having to go 
 to the advanced search...

> Yes, it might be confusing to have different behaviour for different
> conditions. A simple default of AND might then be best.

I doubt it...   I expect that on average, OR will be the right guess 
more often - that's the behaviour we have now, basically...

> 1) In the Edit Tag dialog of a top-level tag, there could be a
> checkbox that makes searches within the top-level tag revert to OR
> behaviour. Additionally, in the Preferences there could be an option
> to have searches across top-level tags revert to OR as well.

I think this would be pretty confusing to the naive user...

> 2) Just have everything AND, and when users want something more
> powerful, they can fire up the Advanced Search dialog. There's a patch
> for that, that worked rather well I believe.

I think this would be moderately un-useful...  most useful queries need 
a mix of AND/OR - forcing the user to go to the dialog to get both 
AND/OR would be annoying...

It seems like a hybrid solution might be best -  default to AND between 
top level categories and OR within them, but provide a relatively easy 
way to switch that default on the fly (modifier key, RMB menu, something 
like that)

With the current 'OR' based filtering, I find I miss NOT almost as often 
as I miss AND...   providing a way to do that easily also would be 
fantastic...

Warren