Proposed Search Improvements

The current search is incredibly basic and not great. It only shows results that match ALL of the specified tags. Here are some features that could make the search much better:

• Ability to search by other metadata (title, date, number of favorites, number of views, etc.)
• Ability to sort by date, number of views, number of favorites, etc.
• Boolean logic in searches

It would be amazing if I could do these searches:

• cute || snuggles || hugs
• sfw && (cuddles || kissing)
• gay && !(nsfw || suggestive)

For some fields like number of favorites, number of views, and date, it would also be great to have numeric range queries (high/low/band pass filters):

• Let's say I wanted to get images of tigers that had greater than 100 likes. It would be great to be able to have a query like this:
  • tigers && favorites.gt:100
• Let's say I wanted to have look at images with the cute tag that have less than 500 views:
  • cute && views.lt:500

Derpibooru has one of the best searches I have seen (https://derpibooru.org/search/syntax). It has all these features (boolean searching, metadata searching) and more (fuzzy queries, some regex features). They use Elasticsearch which is an open source project used by many big names like Netflix, Wikimedia, Stack Exchange, GitHub, and SoundCloud.

I know that the features I am proposing may require a lot of coding and testing, especially for query parsing, but I just wanted to let you know what you could do to make the search the best it can possibly be.