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Mismatch between search guidance, search help page, and search behaviour for votes and score
There is some inconsistency between the guidance and the behaviour when searching by votes or by score.
Searching by votes
In-page search guidance
votes:4 votes with 4+ votes
Search help page
you can use
votes:5to find posts where the net votes (upvotes minus downvotes) of a post equals 5 or higher
Actual behaviour
Searching for votes:4 gives results with votes +A/-B, where A-B=4 (exactly 4, not 4+ as mentioned in the example or suggested on the help page).
Searching by score
In-page search guidance
score:0.5 votes with 0.5+ score
Search help page
you can use
score:0.5to filter your search to only include posts with a score of at least 0.5
The search results page "Advanced Search Options" box
score:>=0.5 created:<1y grammarwould return only posts mentioning "grammar" that have a score >= 0.5 and were created less than a year ago
Actual behaviour
Searching for score:0.5 gives results with score 0.5 (exactly 0.5, not 0.5+ as mentioned in the example or suggested on the help page - only the "Advanced Search Options" box correctly states that >= is required to achieve this behaviour).
Searching by upvotes and downvotes
Search help page
If you search for
upvotes:4, Codidact will find posts that have received at least 4 upvotes
Likewise, if you search for
downvotes:4, Codidact will find posts that have received at least 4 downvotes
Actual behaviour
Searching for upvotes:4 gives results with 4 upvotes (exactly 4, not at least 4 as suggested on the help page).
Searching for downvotes:4 gives results with 4 downvotes (exactly 4, not at least 4 as suggested on the help page).
Solution options
Should the wordings be changed to match the behaviour, or should the behaviour be changed to match the wordings?
Since the current behaviour is significantly more powerful than most of the wordings currently suggest, my preference would be to improve the in-page example wordings to use an example including >= (which will achieve the behaviour they currently describe), and to give more detailed examples on the help page to show all 5 usages (<, <=, exact, >=, and >).
1 answer
Thanks for this report. The behavior is powerful; we should update the documentation, not limit search.
I've updated the search topic in the help center to describe how the operators actually work and pushed that change to the network. I can do that much without changing code. :-) I've also submitted a PR to update this topic in GitHub for the benefit of other Codidact instances.
We also need to update the search hints (in the modal) and the text on the results page. I have a PR for that, so when that merges and is deployed, the bugs reported here will all be fixed.
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