A search that excludes a folder no longer searches only that folder

A query can exclude a location by prefixing it with a minus: -path:Archive means everywhere except Archive, and -path:Archive|Drafts means except either of those.

The exclusion was being read as its opposite. The minus was dropped and the location kept, so the query was treated as though it had asked for that location — and because a location is also what decides which store to look in, the search was sent to the very partition it had been told to skip. The result was one of two wrong answers: rows from exactly the folder you excluded, or nothing at all. Neither raised an error, so a query that returned nothing read as "there is nothing there".

A negated location is now a filter, not a destination. -path:Archive narrows the rows — "every row whose path is not Archive" — and the query looks wherever the rest of it says to look. A query whose only location was the excluded one now says it is not specific enough, and asks for a place to search or an explicit request to search everywhere, instead of silently searching the one place that was ruled out.

Ordered comparisons on a location (path:>"m", used for paging) were already treated this way for the same reason. Ordinary positive forms — path:Acme/Docs, path:A|B — are unchanged.