Question

What does it mean to "negative" a search value?

Answer 1

The example I always use is if you're interested in dolphins, but not in the Miama Dolphins football team, you would do a search on Google like this:

dolphins -miami

This returns all pages with dolphins in them but removes all pages that have miami in them.

It's a powerful technique particularly when used with FogBugz's search axes:

status:open -assignedto:me

... gives you all open cases but removes the ones that are assigned to you.

You can also add negative searches to a filter. This would allow you to ignore all cases in the Undecided milestone, for instance, but adding -milestone:"Undecided" to your filter.