minus sign to filter results?

SEA

When I enter a food, like popcorn I ate at the movies last night, I cannot filter out the word microwave. I end up with a list of many packaged microwave popcorn foods from a grocery store, and that is not what I am looking for. If I put a minus sign before the word microwave, it does not seem to have an effect on the resulting list.

Hilary

@SEA , try searching in the "Common Foods" tab to filter your results! You will find a list of food entries from the NCC Database. I would reccomend using "Popcorn, Home Popped, Hot Air Popped", or "Popcorn, Home popped, popped in fat".
You can learn more about how to make good choices when searching for foods and how to get the most out of Cronometer here: https://cronometer.com/blog/6-tips-getting-nutrition-data/

SEA

Thats what i ended up using, home popped in fat, as I am pretty sure there is a lot of fat in theater popcorn.

SEA

I guess my real question is why i cannot filter out results with a minus sign. Also, often the results list is often populated with close, but wrongly spelled words. For instance today I wanted to add a bread that is made with only wheat and water, no salt, no other ingredients as I have found I can tolerate it. It does not cause digestive upset as wheat-containing foods usually do. It is called Poilâne. The Cronometer search engine came up with Poland, Polane, Polaner. If I could, I would type in -Pola, and filter out all those close but mis-spelled results. Do you understand my point?

Hilary

Hi @SEA unfortunately that is not a search convention we use for Cronometer. I'm not familiar with, it but I could see how that would be useful!
We do filter out search results already. In this case, searching Poilâne will return Poland, Polane, Polaner only because we do not have any search results containing Poilâne. If Poilâne was contained in our database it would be the first search result you would find. By returning these other options (Not misspelled but different products altogether) it provides users who may have entered a misspelled word in the search bar the opportunity to browse similarly spelled results.

IAmAgainst

Opening the foods database to search engines would allow users to use Google's advanced search tools to find items. Using the minus sign for exclusion is as old as the internet..