Asterisk Wildcard *
You can use an asterisk (*) in the place of a character in your search term to indicate that any number of characters can be substituted in place of the asterisk.
For example: admin* will return: administrator, administration, administer, administered, etc.
Asterisk is a time saver as you don't need to create long OR statements or consider every inflected form of a particular word.
Disable Stemming Using $ Sign
Stemming is the process of reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word stem, base or root form. For example, if the user enters "viewer" as the query, the search engine reduces the word to its root ("view") and returns all documents containing the root - like documents containing view, viewer, viewing, preview, review etc.
We currently support stemming only for English, Russian, Spanish and Arabic.
To disable stemming, just append the dollar sign ($) to the end of the keyword. For example, searching for the keyword "simplivity" will also return documents containing the word "simple" since we index the stemmed version of the verb, but if you want to find documents that contain "simplivity" and nothing else, search for "simplivity$".
(Parentheses)
Use parentheses to encapsulate OR statements for the search engines to execute them properly.
The OR operator is interpreted as "I would like at least one of these terms."
For example: (apache OR weblogic OR websphere)
If you don’t enclose all of your OR statements, your search may run but it will NOT run as intended.
"Quotation Marks"
Quotation marks must be used when searching for exact phrases of more than one word, or else you may get documents with the phrase split up into single word components.
For example: Nobel Prize Winners 2010
Your results could bring back pages that have Nobel Prize, winners of prizes, 2010 winners of prizes, 2010 winners of prizes..and the list goes on. Probably not what you were hoping for, to say the least.
However, using quotation marks around your phrases takes care of this problem. When you use quotation marks around a phrase, you are telling the system to only bring back pages that include these search terms in this exact order.
For example: "Nobel Prize Winners 2010"
Your search results now will only bring back pages that have all these words in the exact order that you typed them in.
Using relative times in your searches
The 'Published' and 'Crawled' query filters are used with epoch time in milliseconds; but these query filters can also be used with relative time values e.g. hours, days, months.
Examples:
published:>now-1h
crawled:>now-24d
(crawled:>now-10h AND crawled:<now-1h)
Replace AND / NOT operators with + / -
For the sake of efficiency and to shorten your queries and pass lower-weight requests, you can switch the AND & NOT Boolean operators with Plus or Minus signs, accordingly.
So, for example this query: toast AND ((butter AND jelly) NOT (ham))
is the equivalent of passing: toast+((butter+jelly)-(ham))
Highlight keyword matches
Use the &highlight=true GET parameter in your queries, to highlight the text and title fragments around the keywords that yielded the search-results.