Negative Search

[bbb651]

Many search implementations allow various kinds of search operators and modifiers to better narrow down the results. One of these is negative search terms, allowing -{term} to be interpreted roughly as "don't include results that have {term} in them". I think it would be a really useful addition for searching on crates.io.

The example that led me to the idea is looking for a crate to deal with color distance and mixing. Simply searching for the word "color" yields an overwhelming amount of ANSI color libraries, which have the perfect set of qualities of being both entirely irreverent for what I'm looking for and really popular. This makes it really tedious to find relevant crates, because the ones I'm interested don't have anything to search for that the other ones don't, but there's a very obvious term I'm specifically not interested in.

Unfortunately it seems like searching is handled by postgres and from a quick search it doesn't seem like it's possible to support it, but maybe it is possible and if not I still think it's impotent to consider with future stack changes.