How to exclude names (or places) from a search?
Here is an example of the problem I face:
I search for people with "Monedero" as family name. By default, the search interface assumes that "Montero" is a close version, and it lists those hits also. However, Montero as a name is much more common than Monedero, and as a result, the results have lots of Montero records.
(I would like to still get hits from other similar names to Monedero; I don't want to limit the search to Monedero, strictly. )
In Google's interface I could do a similar thing by adding a hyphen as a prefix to the word I want to exclude. To search by Monedero but not Montero, "Monedero -Montero".
Are there ways to exclude names from a search?
Thank you!
Answers
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As far as I know, FS's search interface does not have an "exclude" or "not" option. (Or if it does, it has been hidden for so long that nobody knows it.)
If you have some idea of the sorts of variations that you do want to see, you can use the wildcards that are available: asterisk for any number of characters, including zero, and question mark for exactly one character. For example, "Mon?dero" matches Monodero as well as Monedero, but not Montero. It's not as satisfactory as an exclude option would be, and you'll probably end up doing more than one search, with different variations of wildcards, but it should get you where you want to be, in the end.
(I often wish for a "set" option: "this character can be any of {ijy}". But at that point we're getting into regular expressions territory, and I don't think we're ever going to see that in a non-geek search interface.)
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WIldcards! I had no idea they could be used. That is really helpful, thank you!
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