I have been doing a specific search with Flickr’s advanced search engine and it has been giving me no results or the wrong results altogether. For example:
I search for the exact phrase “specific item”.
I exclude “do not want”, “no thank you”, “et cetera”. (These are examples only- my actual excluded terms are single words and aren’t in quotes)
Flickr’s search engine treats this as if I am searching for all of the above and either shows me a single result or no results at all. I will do the search and will get nothing. And then I press back to go back to the advanced search page and I see that instead of my search being “specific item” in the Search For column and “do not want” in the None Of These Words column, they have instead been combined into one super plus and minus search that their search engine has no idea what to do with.
If I do the search by itself, with no exclusions, I can search for “specific item” but there are always (and I mean always) results that I did not want. I can manually filter through these but when the advanced search used to work I didn’t have to see them at all.
Flickr does not seem to have a contact link so I have no idea how to get ahold of them to let them know their search engine is badly broken.
The help forum is probably the best place to start.
I will say I can match your experience. I did a search for Football, excluding American.
The first set of pictures that came up were of American Football games. This wouldn’t be too unexpected, as many people who take photos of these game might not use “American” in the description or tags. In this case, however the photos were all titled “American Football”.
It seems pretty clear that the “football -american” search is not working quite right. It doesn’t match the “football american” search though - that one has at least the first picture that is not included in the “-american” search – although the rest of the first two rows seem to be shared between the two.
I found Flickr’s help forum and I have posted there.
The greater question seems to be in that Flickr broke this search method intentionally in order to improve it. However, I see no obvious improvement. It just doesn’t work at all now. Search for “puppies” minus “cute”, “cuddly” and “squishy” and if you get any results at all it will be of a cute cuddly squishy puppy. Total opposite of how it should work.
I have suggested that they simply revert to the previous advanced search, which had the good habit of actually working. We’ll see.