This form allows you to perform an advanced search. You only need to fill in one field below. This can be any field. If you select "not" as your match criteria, you must select one other field.
Advanced Search returning JSON, XML, and more
Explanation of Terms, Operators, Queries, and Grouping
Here, you will find an explanation on how the syntax to the search engine works.
Our site uses the Apache Lucene opensource search engine library
and uses its
lucene
query syntax. A briefer explanation of the syntax follows.
Terms:
The search engine supports two types of terms, single terms and phrases.
A single term is a single word such as "test" or "hello".
A phrase is a group of words such as "duck and cover".
Field Specific queries:
If you want to restrict your search to a specific part of the metadata, you
can append in front the term a Field Shortcut, such as:
will look for "Duck and Cover" only in the title of
the items. For more information on Field Shortcuts, see section about Field
Shortcuts Expansion
NOTE: searching in only a restricted set is better than using the default set
for two reasons:
it’s much faster
the results are much more relevant
Boolean Operators:
By default, the operator is AND, which means that the query:
is exactly similar to test AND hello, which means that documents containing
the term "test" AND the term "hello" will be returned.
The query:
will return documents either containing the term "test" OR the term "hello".
The query:
will return documents that contain the term "test" but not the term "hello"
NOTE: using the NOT operator, be sure to supply at least one term without
the NOT, or search will fail (the query NOT test is not valid).
Range Queries:
range queries allow you to search for documents whose field match values in
between two bounds, for example:
will return items whose download count is between 1000 and 2000.
using [] will include the bounds in the search, and () will exclude the
bounds from the search If you don’t want to specify a bound,
you can use the special keyword "null":
will search for items with more that 10000
downloads.
Boosting a term:
Boosting allows you to control the relevance of a document by boosting its
term. For example, if you are searching for war gulf and you want the term
"gulf" to be more relevant boost it using the ^ symbol along with the boost
factor next to the term. You would type:
This will make documents with the term gulf appear more relevant.
Grouping:
The search engine supports using parentheses to group clauses to form
subqueries, for example:
you can also use this feature within a field:
Fuzzy Queries:
If you are not sure how to spell a word you can ask the search engine to try
to figure it out for you. To do this, append a ~ after the term to apply it
on, for example:
will find the words buttonwood, as well as
cottonwood and buttonware.
NOTE: this query involves a lot of computing, so use it wisely and expect to
wait a little for results to come in!
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