Hints for the advanced search

General hints

• Each search term must contain at least three characters.
• A number of common words is silently ignored. This is to increase performance and to improve the quality of the search results.

Search operators

There is a number of operators which allow to fine-tune your search (see below for examples).

• +

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

• -

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

• (no operator)

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

• *

  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 articles that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.

The following examples demonstrate the usage of the advanced search.

• apple banana

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

• +apple +juice

  Find articles that contain both words.

• +apple tree

  Find articles that contain the word apple, but rank articles higher if they also contain tree.

• +apple -tree

  Find articles that contain the word apple but not tree.

• apple*

  Find articles that contain words such as apple, apples, applesauce, or applet.

• "sweet apple"

  Find articles that contain the exact phrase sweet apple (for example, articles that contain my sweet apple but not my sweet and tasty apple).