"Tree -incategory:Trees"

However, this has limitations, most notably it searches only the category itself, not the whole subcategory tree (therefore it does not do anything useful in this specific example; try e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=Su-22+-incategory%3A%22Sukhoi+Su-22%22). But that would be (AFAICT/IMHO) practically an impossible task to do, anyway.

test5555 wrote:

Thanks. It seems to work when using
"Su-22" -incategory:"Sukhoi Su-22"
instead of
Su-22 -incategory:"Sukhoi Su-22"

Obviously, sometimes subcategories should be checked too, but I don't think Mayflower did that either. One had to list each one separately.

test5555 wrote:

/Search result page format/

(1) To avoid that I forget about this, when searching for "Su-22", it might help
if there was a link next the categories to exclude
results from this category,
e.g. next to the category "Sukhoi Su-22", the link would search for
"Su-22" -incategory:"Sukhoi Su-22"

The link could be titled something like "exclude results from this category".

(2) This might even work recursively. When continuing with
"Su-22" -incategory:"Sukhoi Su-22"
one could exlude further categories that get listed.

test5555 wrote:

For another approach, please see

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gadgets-definition#Search_link_on_categories

mhershberger wrote:

Unassigning default assignments. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54734

[Merging "MediaWiki extensions/Lucene Search" into "Wikimedia/lucene-search2", see bug 46542. You can filter bugmail for: search-component-merge-20130326 ]

This CirrusSearch query on Commons supports this behaviour: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&search=Tree+-incategory%3A%22Trees%22&fulltext=Search

As we're in the process of migrating from Lucene to CirrusSearch, I'm marking this bug as RESOLVED WONTFIX.