What is meta? ×

I am hitting a tag for unanswered, open questions using

[myTag]closed:0 answers:0

But I wanted to add another tag to the search. Unfortunately just doing:

[myTag][myOtherTag]closed:0 answers:0

Returns only questions with both tags. I was going for either tag. I can't seem to find the syntax.

Is this implemented yet? (And if not can it be?)

share|improve this question

3 Answers 3


share|improve this answer
Yes, but how do you also get the closed:0 and answers:0 part in there? –  Lance Roberts Mar 9 '10 at 22:50

Well since the original answer someone got drunk and gave me source code access, so how about we allow OR tags?

Your search can now be performed like this: [myTag] or [myOtherTag]closed:0 answers:0, this would return results containing either tag. Here are a few more examples:

  • [myTag] or [myTag2] or [myTag3] closed:0 answers:0 - any of the 3 tags
  • [myTag] or [myTag2] [myTag3] closed:0 answers:0 - either of the first 2 and the 3rd tag
  • [myTag] or [myTag2] [myTag3] or [myTag4] closed:0 answers:0 - either of the first 2 and either of the last 2 (A || B) && (C || D)

Original: Just throwing this option out there, certain tags could be reserved for this purposed: e.g. [closed], [unanswered], [deleted], [protected], etc. (Maybe these are already reserved?). The search could handle these appropriately on the back-end as special filters.

I'm not sure that this would be the best approach, but it would be a way to keep the syntax simpler overall.

Alternatively, you could allow counts to be put in, e.g. [answers:1], in this case [unanswered] would be a simple alias for [answers:0], allowing more flexibility overall...maybe this is over-complicating things though, I'm not sure how many would use this feature...

share|improve this answer
This wouldn't help. The problem is being able to specify either an AND or OR operator on the tags (right now it's always AND) while still being able to use the other closed and answers filters. –  Jon Seigel Jun 8 '10 at 1:39
@Jon Seigel: Look at perbert's answer, you can already do OR, though not via the search box. –  Nick Craver Jun 8 '10 at 1:47
Yes, but as soon as you start adding the search options (like answers:1), the URL changes completely and OR is unsupported. –  Jon Seigel Jun 8 '10 at 2:50
@Jon: Do you mean something like this?: ([c#] OR [.net]) AND [answers:1] With nested sets of operators? My thoughts would be these special tags are always conditions, only the tags themselves would be OR, so these tags directly translate to an additional where... clause, where as your tag search would be one where that's an OR inside...not sure if I'm explaining that well, hope I am. –  Nick Craver Jun 8 '10 at 10:10
Right, the special conditions are always AND'd together (which makes sense), but what I'm saying is that the OR operator for the tags is currently not supported when adding the special conditions to the search. –  Jon Seigel Jun 8 '10 at 18:00

I support this request for tag search with OR combined with other options. Meanwhile, I use a custom SE filter and choose the "no answers" tab. This emulates OR on tags, but it doesn't allow other options such as closed:0, etc.

share|improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .