How To Use Search

The Speedbird Club search function supports the following operators:

• +

  A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each page that is returned.

• -

  A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the pages that are returned.

  Note: The - operator acts only to exclude pages that are otherwise matched by other search terms. Thus, a boolean-mode search that contains only terms preceded by - returns an empty result. It does not return “all pages except those containing any of the excluded terms.”

• (no operator)

  By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the pages that contain it are rated higher.

• > <

  These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a page. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example following this list.

• ( )

  Parentheses group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.

• ~

  A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the page's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A page containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

• *

  The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.

• "

  A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (‘"’) characters matches only pages that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. Non-word characters need not be matched exactly: Phrase searching requires only that matches contain exactly the same words as the phrase and in the same order. For example, "test phrase" matches "test, phrase".

  If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.

The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean full-text operators:

• 'apple banana'

  Find pages that contain at least one of the two words.

• '+apple +juice'

  Find pages that contain both words.

• '+apple macintosh'

  Find pages that contain the word “apple”, but rank pages higher if they also contain “macintosh”.

• '+apple -macintosh'

  Find pages that contain the word “apple” but not “macintosh”.

• '+apple ~macintosh'

  Find pages that contain the word “apple”, but if the page also contains the word “macintosh”, rate it lower than if page does not. This is “softer” than a search for '+apple -macintosh', for which the presence of “macintosh” causes the page not to be returned at all.

• '+apple +(>turnover

  Find pages that contain the words “apple” and “turnover”, or “apple” and “strudel” (in any order), but rank “apple turnover” higher than “apple strudel”.

• 'apple*'

  Find pages that contain words such as “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, or “applet”.

• '"some words"'