Further Search Tips

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

Note: The - operator acts only to exclude results 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 rows except those containing any of the excluded terms.

(no operator)  By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the results 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 result. 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 results's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A result containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

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

'apple banana'
Find results that contain at least one of the two words.

'+apple +juice'
Find rows that contain both words.

'+apple macintosh'
Find results that contain the word "apple", but rank results higher if they also contain "macintosh".

'+apple -macintosh'
Find results that contain the word "apple" but not "macintosh".

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

'+apple +(>turnover <strudel)'
Find results that contain the words "apple" and "turnover", or “apple” and "strudel” (in any order), but rank "apple turnover" higher than "apple strudel".

'apple*'
Find results that contain words such as "apple", "apples", "applesauce", or "applet".

'"some words"'
Find results that contain the exact phrase "some words" (for example, results that contain "some words of wisdom" but not "some noise words").