Filter by Description/Tags Field

[patsimpson2000]

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : safari

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/77986296

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.): I just recently started using the Tag field, mainly to be able to be able to search the ones I already ran into and use as a reference. To search for my caterpillars, I figured I could use the filters with my user name under “your observations” and enter “caterpillar” under the “description/tags” field. I am getting a lot of results where the word “caterpillar” doesn’t even appear in either field. Interestingly enough, the results that shouldn’t be in there are all Lepidoptera. Any idea why this is happening? Getting all these results sorts of defeats the purpose of me entering a tag at all, so I’m a little bummed. I’ve used Tags before for other purposes and they work fine, but this one is a mystery…

Step 1: Select my user name under “person” (patsimpson2000) and type “caterpillar” in the description/tags field and “update search”

Step 2: In the list of results, check out the observations that are adult butterflies or moths.

Step 3: The words caterpillar appears nowhere, so why did they come up in the search…?

[jdmore]

Hi @patsimpson2000,

You can read more about how the Description/Tags search works here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki-part-2/18792#heading--search--terms

In short, it actually searches 4 different things, also including place descriptions and taxon names on the observation. You can limit the search to just one of these areas, but for now that requires that you manually edit the URL of the search page, as described in the above linked tutorial.

To search only within tags, for example, you would add &search_on=tags to the URL of the web page. If I am reading your post correctly, I think clicking on this URL would give you what you are looking for:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=patsimpson2000&q=caterpillar&search_on=tags

[patsimpson2000]

Thank you so much @jdmore it works like a charm!! YEAH!