Searching for tags: Different results

DEVONthink
1

If I see this correctly, these two ways of searching for tags do not lead to the same result. Is that how it should be?

Finds documents with A and B

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Finds documents with A or B

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2

You can specify either AND/OR in your search query
The default is AND

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3

you could also use any: tags:A;B to display both of them.

Best
Steffi

4

Thank you, I can also differentiate between and/or here?

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5

is that the sidebar? If so, you cannot trigger an AND/OR there it, tags are just listed.

Best,
Steffi

6

Yes the sidebar. I’m not sure what you mean by “just listed”. When I click on tag A, of course all documents with tag A are displayed. If I select A and B, you could have expected both. A and B / A or B.

Anyway, it is what it is, thanks Steffi.

7

if you select both A and B all documents for A and B should be displayed.

Your welcome!

Best,
Steffi

8

If I understand the question correctly, I think you are asking “what happens if you select two tag names in the tags list of the sidebar”. This is where I think that talking about boolean “and” and “or” operations gets confusing. What you get by selecting two tag names is a list of items that have either tag A, or tag B, or both tags A and B.

Another way to explain it is like this: the set of items shown by DEVONthink is the union of the set of items tagged with A and the set of items tagged with B.

Note that in your example of tags named A and B (each with two items), the union of those sets may have fewer than 4 items, if some of those items are tagged with both A and B. For example, if I create two documents and tag them both with A and B, then

  • the count of items with tag A will be 2
  • the count of items with tag B will be 2
  • the count of items with either A or B will also be 2
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9

Exactly. And it’s the same when selecting multiple groups in the sidebar.

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