HACKER Q&A
📣 InMoat

Why do some major apps still not support advanced search queries?


This might be a silly question, but why don’t all major apps support advanced search functions using Boolean expressions? Seems like table stakes to me, especially in this day and age.

For example, Slack still doesn’t support Boolean keyword searches. That blows my mind... or am I just missing something?

Is there a reason they’re not supporting it, or is implementing robust advanced search capabilities more difficult than one may think?

  👤 Someone Accepted Answer ✓
Supporting complex Boolean queries is relatively expensive, and their backend likely isn’t optimized for it because few users would use them.

For Slack, they do support some Boolean queries. Reading https://slack.com/help/articles/202528808-Search-in-Slack, we have:

- marketing report is ‘marketing and report’ (especially with >2 words, this may be a fuzzy search)

- marketing -report is ‘marketing and not report’

👤 jbn
It is not a silly question, it is quite shocking how many apps do not even have basic search working in any useable capacity. Outlook is one of them (I believe there used to be a Lookout plugin of some sort to add it on, but I think it died after a few years), the search function seems useless to me.