Search Help

Welcome to the Experts Exchange Search Help Page. This page was written to help you understand how our search system works so you can make better use of Experts Exchange search. If you need more information, please Contact Community Support.

Terms

A query is broken up into single terms and operators. There are 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 surrounded by double quotes such as "hello dolly".

Multiple terms can be combined together with Boolean operators to form a more complex query (see below).

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Fields

We support fielded data. When performing a search you can either specify a field, or use the default fields (Title, Body, and Content). For now our search will support the following fields:

Title, Body, Content, Area, Points

You can search any field by typing the field name followed by a colon ":" and then the term you are looking for.

As an example, if you want to find the document entitled "The Right Way" which contains the text "don't go this way", you can enter:

Note: The field is only valid for the term that it directly precedes, so the query

Title:Do it right

Will only find "Do" in the Title field. It will try and find "it" and "right" in any the default fields (Title, Body, and Content). To search for all three words in the Title, in any order, you would have to use the following query:

Title:Do Title:it Title:right
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Term Modifiers

We support modifying query terms to provide a wide range of searching options.

We support single and multiple character wildcard searches. To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol. To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol. The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search:

te?t

Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters.

For example, to search for test, tests or tester, you can use the search:

test* - or - te*t

Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.

We support fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Single word Term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to "roam" use the fuzzy search:

roam~

This search will find terms like foam and roams

Note:Terms found by the fuzzy search will automatically get a lower boost factor of 0.2

We support finding words that are within a specific distance away. To do a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Phrase. For example to search for a "apache" and "jakarta" within 10 words of each other in a document use the search:

"jakarta apache"~10

We provide the relevance level of matching documents based on the terms found. To boost a term use the caret, "^", symbol with a boost factor (a number) at the end of the term you are searching. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant the term will be. Boosting allows you to control the relevance of a document by boosting its term. For example, if you are searching for:

jakarta apache

and you want the term "jakarta" to be more relevant boost it using the ^ symbol along with the boost factor next to the term. You would type:

jakarta^4 apache

This will make documents with the term jakarta appear more relevant. You can also boost Phrase Terms as in the example:

"jakarta apache"^4 "jakarta lucene"

By default, the boost factor is 1. Although, the boost factor must be positive, it can be less than 1 (i.e. .2)

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Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. We support AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-" as Boolean operators(Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS).

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. This is equivalent to a union using sets. The symbol || can be used in place of the word OR. To search for documents that contain either "jakarta apache" or just "jakarta" use the query:

"jakarta apache" jakarta - or - "jakarta apache" OR jakarta

The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. This is equivalent to an intersection using sets. The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND. To search for documents that contain "jakarta apache" and "jakarta lucene" use the query:

"jakarta apache" AND "jakarta lucene"

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in a the field of a single document. To search for documents that must contain "jakarta" and may contain "lucene" use the query:

+jakarta apache

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. This is equivalent to a difference using sets. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT. To search for documents that contain "jakarta apache" but not "jakarta lucene" use the query:

"jakarta apache" NOT "jakarta lucene"

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results:

NOT "jakarta apache"

The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol. To search for documents that contain "jakarta apache" but not "jakarta lucene" use the query:

"jakarta apache" -"jakarta lucene"
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Grouping

We support using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a query. To search for either "jakarta" or "apache" and "website" use the query:

(jakarta OR apache) AND website

This eliminates any confusion and makes sure that website must exist and either term jakarta or apache may exist.

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Escaping Special Characters

Our current term parser only parses word characters and ignores any other characters. Future releases will include a more technical term parser.

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