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Searching Syntax and Operations

airplane

will find all documents that contain the word airplane.

The following section describes various aspects of searching with Swish-e.

Boolean Operators

You can use the Boolean operators and, or, near or not in searching. Without these Boolean operators Swish-e will assume you're and'ing the words together. The operators are not case sensitive. These three searches are the same:

foo bar

bar foo

foo AND bar

The not operator inverts the results of a search.

not foo

finds all the documents that do not contain the word foo.

Parentheses can be used to group searches.

not (foo and bar)

The result is all documents that have none or one term, but not both.

To search for the words and, or, near or not, place them in a double quotes.

"not"

will search for the word "not".

Other examples:

smilla or snow

Retrieves files containing either the words "smilla" or "snow".

smilla snow not sense

| (smilla and snow) and not sense | (same thing) retrieves first the files that contain both the words "smilla" and "snow"; then among those the ones that do not contain the word "sense". The near keyword is similar to and but implies a proximity between the words. The near keyword takes a integer argument as well, indicating the maximum distance between two words to consider a valid match.

Example:

smilla near5 snow

would match the document if the words smilla and snow appeared within 5 positions of one another.

A near search with no argument or argument of 0 is the same as an and search.

Wildcards

Two different wildcard characters are available, each evoking different behaviour.

The * means "match zero or more characters."

The ? means "match exactly one character."

The wildcard * may only be used at the end of a word. Otherwise * is considered a normal character (i.e. can be searched for if included in the WordCharacters? directive).

Example:

librarian

this query only retrieves files which contain the given word.

On the other hand:

librarian*

retrieves "librarians", "librarianship", etc. along with "librarian".

Note that wildcard searches combined with word stemming can lead to unexpected results. If stemming is enabled, a search term with a wildcard will be stemmed internally before searching. So searching for running* will actually be a search for run*, so running* would find runway. Also, searching for runn* will not find running as you might expect, since running stems to run in the index, and thus runn* will not find run.

The ? wildcard matches exactly one character, but may not be used at the start of a word.

Example:

's?ow'

will match snow, slow and show but not strow.

This:

'?how'

will throw an error.