Vlits

You can only use the negative boolean if you have also used another tag (that’s not negated). Otherwise it shows no results. I often want to look for all fics with word A in the summary without tag B, and don’t want to limit it any further (often due to many fics missing various tags). As an example, searching for a Harry Potter fic with Summary: Harry Tags: -Rape gives no results, but Summary: Harry Tags: PWP -Rape or Summary: Harry Tags: gives results just fine. Testing shows the same happens if you only have a negated term in the Summary and Title fields, but it’s less of an issue as you are not very likely to only use the negative there.

Sorry about the terminology mix-up, I was basing it off another topic where sub-domain was used to reference the het or slash category of a subdomain. I had been hoping it might not be too difficult to search a specific category of a subdomain, as it would solve most of my problems. I know that no matter how good the search engine is, I'll miss out on stories I want (or as is more obvious at the moment, see stories I don't) because of a lack of information in the summary. Honestly, there are more stories that show with nothing indicating slash in the summary (besides the exact pairing, which is even then usually in the category/sub-category listing under the summary) than there are ones that have the "m/m" tag I can't omit from my results, but almost every single one would be removed from the results if I was able to specifically search in individual categories of the subdomains. As for what I'm searching for, it's not anything specific, as there are a number of different things I end up searching for depending on what sort of story I'm looking for at the time. And I make use of the instructions on the search page quite thoroughly, but a lot of the time I'm looking for something a little more general than the instructions reference, but at the same time a little more specific than the search engine seems capable of (at least with regards to excluding certain things, mainly slash. It's probably more effort than it's worth as a temporary fix considering a full revamp of the search engine is in the works, but I had hoped it might be a little easier to narrow the section of the database being searched than it most likely is. (I'm the OP, but for some reason it had logged me out before I made the first post, and I didn't realize until I had already posted.)