Searching on more than two tags?

June 12, 2007 11:07 AM

So with all the (very very greatly appreciated!) tagging going on, is there some way to search on more than two specific tags at a time? I love the /tags/thing1+thing2, but that seems to be all there is...
posted by TheNewWazoo to feature requests at 11:07 AM (9 comments total)

Here is a search for posts tagged with both "Apple" and "Music." Just follow the format for other tag combos.

http://www.metafilter.com/tags/Apple+music
posted by caddis at 11:33 AM on June 12, 2007

yep, that's all there is. You can't search for three tags together at this time.
posted by mathowie at 11:34 AM on June 12, 2007

Nevermind, I can't get it to go beyond two tags, it just ignores the rest.
posted by caddis at 11:35 AM on June 12, 2007

http://www.metafilter.com/tags/Apple+music+LOLcaddis+RECURSION+IS+YOUR+FRIEND+MATT
posted by quonsar at 11:46 AM on June 12, 2007

No, dear god, not recursion. If he implements it that way, we can look forward to the Second Dominion of JRun the JRuinous.
posted by Plutor at 11:48 AM on June 12, 2007

I don’t know what RDBS the MeFi code works with, but trying to make that sort of thing work in MySQL, without real set logic (like INTERSECT) and subqueries would be awful.
posted by breaks the guidelines? at 12:08 PM on June 12, 2007

thing1+thing2
posted by Brittanie at 3:06 PM on June 12, 2007

mathowie, would you be willing to expose the result of a tag search as a REST service of some kind?

For instance, suppose the query
http://www.metafilter.com/tagservice/lolcats

were to return solely the text

58500,60556,60834,60848,61373,61598,61678

Then a third party such as myself could easily write a multi-tag-searcher (and the CPU burden on you would be quite minimal).
posted by dmd at 12:22 PM on June 13, 2007

This page on the internets has handy SQL for wrangling all sorts of interesting tag groupings, depending on your tag schema.
posted by ambilevous at 7:05 PM on June 13, 2007