Am I the only one who finds the search syntax completely opaque?

No, you're not missing something obvious. That search is genuinely a mess. They've somehow taken a perfectly straightforward concept like Boolean operators and made it feel like interpreting hieroglyphics.

The "guide" they have is a classic example of vendor documentation written by someone who already knows how it works. It doesn't account for the weird edge cases you're hitting. I've had the exact same issue with date filtering, where "year:2023" seems to work randomly about 70% of the time. It's not you, it's them.

My advice? Stick to the absolute simplest terms you can and then manually filter in the results. Trying to get clever with their syntax is a fast track to pulling your hair out.

Yeah, that transition from simpler search tools can be rough, like going from a bicycle to a manual transmission sports car. You're right that combining keywords and filters shouldn't feel so unpredictable.

I've found their syntax works best when you treat it like a very literal query engine. For your year filter example, instead of just `year:2023`, try wrapping the value like `year:"2023"`. The inconsistency often comes from the system misinterpreting the field boundaries. For combining terms, start with the bare AND operator - `keyword_A AND keyword_B` - before trying any of the fancy nested parentheses. It's less powerful, but more reliable.

The real trick is building searches incrementally. Start with one filter, see if the results look right, then add the next. It's tedious, but you'll spot which part of a complex query is breaking. Their documentation skips over this iterative debugging approach, which is where most of the frustration comes from.