Full Text Searching (including the manual, wiki, forum, news and tickets)
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Nov 05, 2010
- 1352 views
After a few conversations on IRC I learned that not everyone knows about the full text searching. I'll describe it a bit since I just added the capability of searching the manual as well.
The interface is located to the right. It's labeled "Search," has an entry box for the search terms and two buttons, one to "Go" and another for "Options."
The entry box and the Go button are pretty easy to understand. The Options button (opts) will make visible a series of checkboxes. Items that are checked will be searched. Right now possible options are News, Tickets, Forum, Wiki and Manual. All are checked by default. You can search any combination of those items. When searching from the manual the Options box does not appear. The search from the manual will search the manual only.
The manual search is brand new and still has some issues for finding things easily. For example, searching for "socket" will show all sorts of items because every item (almost) contains the words "include socket.e.", thus almost every item appears. Work is being done to make the interface easier to use.
Now, about the actual search query box. It is a full text search. That means you can add modifiers to words and groupings. For example:
| Search Box | Result |
|---|---|
| john doe | Contains "john" or "doe" |
| +john doe | Contains "john" and entries with "doe" also are ranked higher than those without |
| +john +doe | Contains both "john" and "doe" |
| +john -doe | Contains "john" but does not contain "doe" |
| +john +(doe smith) | Contains "john" and either "doe" or "smith" |
| +john -(doe smith) | Contains "john" and not "doe" or "smith" |
| john >doe | Contains "john" or "doe" but ranks items matching "doe" higher |
| john <doe | Contains "john" or "doe" but ranks items matching "doe" lower |
I'll let your imagination run here. I'm sure that you can figure out all sorts of things from here.
Jeremy
