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I want to execute the following search on Stack Overflow:

Give me all questions that are either related to [rider] or to unit testing with C# ([c#] and [nunit], [xunit] or [unit-testing]).

This is my search string:

(([xunit] OR [nunit] OR [unit-testing]) AND [c#]) OR [rider]

It returns exactly one result, which confuses me - there are much more questions on Stack Overflow matching these criteria.

So I assume that either my search string is wrong or not supported.

Any ideas?

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    SO search is simply not that intelligent. Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:06
  • I don't think the search function supports parentheses for such logic. You'd be better off using a few ORs and then adding watched tags to highlight the one's you want to look at. maybe [xunit] OR [nunit] OR [unit-testing] OR [rider] and have [rider] and [c#] as your watched tags. Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:07
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    It's much better to use site:StackOverflow.com and do a search from the web. Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:07
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    @Larnu It does support parentheses, just not to that level, and IIRC you need to have spaces around the parentheses too, so ( ( [xunit] OR [nunit] OR [unit-testing] ) AND [c#] ) works as you'd expect, but I don't believe it can do the OR [rider] in addition to that. Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:08
  • Okay, thank you! Do you know whether there are plans to build a more sophisticated search that would support these SQLish expressions? Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:21
  • It seems to work with ( [xunit] or [nunit] or [unit-testing] or [rider] ) and ( [C#] or [rider] ) Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:38
  • Awesome @Damien, that seems to give me the expected results 🥳 would you please provide it as an answer? Commented May 19, 2022 at 14:42
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    @MarkBenningfield for general content searching yes, but for specific tag-based queries, no Google is actually not as good, because it doesn't have direct support for classifying questions by tags like Stack Overflow does Commented May 19, 2022 at 16:22

1 Answer 1

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Because of the limitations of the search engine, you have to limit parenthesis nesting.

In your case, it seems to work with :

 ( [xunit] or [nunit] or [unit-testing]  or [rider] )  and ( [C#]  or [rider] )
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  • Today I learned that imbrication is a word. So essentially... don't nest parentheses? Commented May 19, 2022 at 15:58
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    @Gimby I am not so good at English. imbrication is correct in French ... and the word exists in English. So I used it. nesting is certainly more usual. I will modify the text. Commented May 19, 2022 at 16:02

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