Exclude words from text search

I am trying to search for coda docs that contain specific words and also exclude other specific words. I tried to put a minus sign in front of the text I want to exclude but that didn’t work. Then I tried “!=” and that also did not work. Any ideas on how I can do a text search for a Coda doc that does NOT contain a specific word?

Hi this is Ben and I’m an engineer working on search at Coda. Great question - it’s admittedly a bit hidden and only works for some search entrypoints today, but if you go to coda.io/docs and search across your docs this type of syntax should be supported. To achieve a search for “termA” and not “termB” the query syntax would be “termA + -termB” . The plus is needed as an “and” operator - otherwise the query defaults to assuming “or” between terms and would be “anything with termA in it or not termB in it” which probably isn’t very useful. One more nuance here is that how this is checked against various fields we index for search may vary on the type, so might suggest to combine this with the “type” → “page” filter eg if you are looking to filter for page text that doesn’t have the term of interest.

Hope that helps! Taking a step back it definitely helps us to hear what types of queries and search use cases are of interest, so please keep the questions and feedback coming!

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