Advanced search queries

Below are some examples of Advanced search queries which may assist in narrowing results when using the OIC search engine.

Operators

Phrase operator

A phrase query can be specified by putting quote characters ("") around your query words. Using the phrase operator specifies that the component words must appear consecutively and in the order specified. Note that intervening punctuation, HTML tags etc will be ignored.

Example - "barking dog"

Dysjunction operator

The dysjunction operator acts like an OR in a Boolean language. The results will contain any document that has at least one of the query terms.

Example - [barking dog] complaint

A full answer to this query will include the word complaint and one or more of barking or dog.

Negation operator

The negation operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from the fully matching results.

Example - dog !barking

A full answer to this query will include the word dog but no occurrence of the word barking. Unlike the mandatory exclusion operator (see below), partial results presented in subsequent result tiers may contain the word barking.

Mandatory exclusion operator

The mandatory exclusion operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from all results. This is similar to the NOT operator in a Boolean language.

Example - dog -barking

A full answer to this query will include the word dog but no occurrence of the word barking. Unlike the negation operator (see above), no results will contain the word barking in the indexable part of the text. The partial results are those which satisfy the mandatory constraint (no barking) but which do not contain dog.

Mandatory inclusion operator

The mandatory inclusion operator will return results that all have the included terms.

Example - dog +barking

A full answer to this query will include the words dog and barking. Every result will contain the word barking. 

Near (proximity) operator

The near operator (backquotes) requires that the query words appear, in any order, within 15 words of each other.

Example - `information signature`

The full answer to this query will be those documents that include the word information within 15 words of signature (in any order).