Shared deck search works poorly

Anki Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

When sharing a deck, you are asked to provide some tags.

However, it seems these tags do not actually effect search results.

It makes certain sets hard to find. For example, my set is named AP Computer Science Principles, but the course is often referred to as AP CSP. I included that as a tag, but searching for “AP CSP” brings no results.

Is this intentional?

1 Like
2

Remember that tags are separated by spaces. So in adding a tag “AP CSP”, you effectively added two tags: “AP” and “CSP”. See here, and here, i.a.

To search by tags:

  1. Click on Browse from the menu at the top of the main window.
  2. Click on the deck, in which you wish to search. NB This step is optional, but will help limit the results. You can search through your whole collection, if you wish.
  3. In the central panel, add tag:CSP after the name of the deck in the search field at the top. This will show you the cards that you sought.

I’d suggest that you use “AP_CSP” as your tag, if you wish to have those terms as a single tag. Otherwise you can search for one of the tags as shown above or search using both tags by adding tag:AP tag:CSP after the deck name.

Tags are very useful for creating Custom or Filtered Decks.

2 Likes
3

Perfect, that works, but I think the share page needs some clarification here.

I now realize it states, on the share deck page, that the tags are space-separated; however, it does not explain that an underscore acts as a space.

I understand that there is documentation on adding tags to a card which clarifies this, but I was under the impression that the tags for sharing on ankiweb.net were completely different than those seen in the Anki client.

4

An underscore does not act as a space. I only suggest it as a way of linking two words together, if you want a tag that contains both of them. That is what I use in several of my published decks.

Anki works the same on its mobile clients (AnkiDroid for Android devices, AnkiMobile for iOS devices), the Anki desktop, and the web interface (https://ankiweb.net/decks). However you set up your tags, they will appear the same on all the platforms. There is considerable effort by the developers to ensure a common experience.

1 Like
5

I think there is a confusion here. @UCYT5040’s issue is with the tags that mark a shared deck itself (available on AnkiWeb only), not the usual Anki tags attached to individual notes inside the deck. The search option in quesion is the one here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=CSP
I, at least, wasn’t able to make a working query out of two separate tags. Using “AP_CSP” as a single tag will probably work, but will require people to put a very specific query, which makes the tag useless for discovering the deck.

2 Likes
6

Cheers. I did not pick that up. Yes, single-word tags for decks being shared is best, as most people will type in searches of one or more single words.

7

That’s the issue though. Ankiweb seems to be able to search only for a single tag, you can’t combine it in a query with a different tag or with the deck’s name.

8

You can, however, search on words in the deck’s name.

It seems that you can search on a tag or one or more words in the deck name, but not both. I don’t seem to be able to mix tags and words from the title.

9

The search input is treated as a single input, and is not currently split on spaces.

1 Like
10

Thanks, @dae . That would explain the behaviour.