"See Also" doesn't respect excluded groups?

Don’t know yet if this is a bug in the software, or just a bug in my understanding of the feature, but it seems like the “See Also” feature of the classifier is not ignoring a group that I’ve asked it to ignore.

I have a group in my database called “Books,” and it contains a bunch of ebooks (PDFs) on various topics. I noticed that when I tried to classify new documents in my inbox, it would invariably pick one of these books as the top hit. I understand why it would do this, and so I next set out to exclude the contents of the “Books” group from consideration for classification.

First, I selected the “Books” group and then opened the Information window (Tools -> Show Info). Next, I ticked off the “Exclude from…” boxes next to “Classification” and “See Also”. Now when I try to classify documents, I can definitely see that it’s ignoring the “Books” group for the classification function (i.e. the top half of the drawer). But for the “See Also” function (the bottom half of the drawer), the first choice is the document itself (duh) and the second choice is a book from my “Books” group.

I’ve tried restarting DEVONthink, and rebuilding the database, etc. but have not yet found a way to get it to ignore that group. Any suggestions?

This setting isn’t inherited and therefore you have to exclude each document/book on its own.

Yikes. OK, thanks, I’ll do that then. I wonder why they decided to make that behavior inconsistent?

Because items can have multiple parent groups and therefore multiple settings. Therefore the current behaviour is actually consistent.