Stackover API gives different search results than web interface

Question

I'm playing with the SO api, and noticed that the api call to search for lesscss gives total: 13 items with the api param tagged=lesscss

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.0/search?tagged=lesscss

but the web interface gives a little over 30

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=lesscss

I think the reason is that the web interface searches not only for the word as a tag, but also searches for the word in the body of the questions/answers. So is there a better way to do this search with the api so that it gives more complete results

Answer 1

In the webinterface to perform search for a tagged question you should search with squarebraked like [lesscss] and the result page should be: Tagged Lesscss

To reply to your answer using api you can only search intitle, tagged or nottagged...

This is the error message from api:

One of 'tagged', 'nottagged', or 'intitle' must be set on this method.

And this is the Documentation of Api Search

as you can see:

This method is intentionally quite limited. For more general searching, you should use a proper internet search engine restricted to the domain of the site in question.

So no, you can't retrive a complete result like webinterface does :)