Negative keyword operator at search

[gmourier]

The feature proposal is to introduce an operator - to exclude terms from the documents to be matched.

We could use it in this way to exclude the term cars from the documents to be returned at search time.

{
    "q": "-cars"
}

[berti92]

As discussed with Olu on discord I should write my use case for this feature:

I implemented Meilisearch as a replacement for Elasticsearch for my document management system. I do not have a detailed filter function in my software, because 99% of the searches were possible by searching with the right syntax.

For example: "application -2019". Search every document with the string "application" but not documents which includes the string "2019".

I know that Meilisearch is not a drop in replacement for elasticsearch and that your software has not the same featureset, but I think this would be a good addition.

[gmourier]

Hello @berti92

Thanks for the effort in writing it here.

Unfortunately, I don't see a workaround in the meantime.

I understand the point of having this kind of expression and it could be a complement to the phrase search expression.

I have a couple of questions that come to mind: when you type -term, do you expect the term to be exactly written the same way in the document?

By this, I mean having no matching via synonyms or typo tolerance corrections to the query term being negated.

In addition, the search would be limited to a single term in the form presented here. Should it be compatible with multiple terms? For example, fire service -"multiple terms".

If yes, do you expect to exclude documents containing the terms in that order or could it also negate documents containing terms multiple ?

As you can see from the discussion, this is a need that seems to have little enthusiasm, but having discussed it in the past with the team, it has been identified as a low-hanging fruit in its instinctive form (-term), so perhaps we could make a good first question and facilitate external input on this topic if we don't prioritize it over other more important topics.

[macraig]

Hi everyone, we're happy to share that we've started working on adding negative keyword operators. It's planned as part of our v1.8 release, coming out on May 6th.

[macraig]

Hello everyone 👋

We have just released the first RC (release candidate) of Meilisearch containing this new feature!
You can test it by using

• the release assets
• the Meilisearch Docker image

docker run -it --rm -p 7700:7700 -v $(pwd)/meili_data:/meili_data getmeili/meilisearch:v1.8.0-rc.0

You are welcome to leave your feedback in this discussion.

If you encounter any bugs, please report them here.
Thanks in advance for your help and your involvement in Meilisearch ❤️

🎉 Official and stable release containing this change will be available on May 6th, 2024

⚠️ RC (release candidates) are not recommended for production