SAPIEN Solutions

 

Query Tips

Reading through the following tips will help you better utilizes our advanced query language, enabling you to create better result sets when you're searching.

Keywords

If you just type keywords separated by spaces, your results will contain documents that contain any of the specified keywords. Documents containing more than one of your keywords will be ranked higher (e.g., at the top of the search results).

Boolean Operators

You can use AND, OR, and NOT to refine your query.

VBScript OR PowerShell AND ADSI AND NOT WMI

All NOT keywords are evaluated first, then AND, and then OR. Expressions in parentheses are evaluated from the most deeply-nested expression outward.

You can also use the NEAR operator. This is similar to AND in that both keywords must be in the document, but a higher rank is given to the keywords when they appear nearby one another. For example:

VBScript NEAR ADSI

You'll get a higher hit rank from the phrase "VBScript and ADSI are useful together" than you would from "I use VBScript, and a long time ago I used ADSI," because in the first phrase the two keywords are nearer to one another.

Phrases

If you want to search for a complete phrase, put it inside double quotes. For example, "VBScript Editor" will return pages that contain that exact phrase, while VBScript Editor will contain pages that contain either (but not necessarily both) keywords.

Wildcards

The * and ? characters have special meaning in queries. The ? character is a wildcard for any single character, while * is a wildcard for any number of characters - much like Windows' own file system. So the query VB* will return pages containing VBScript, VBA, and VBX. The query ?ars will return Mars, Bars, and so forth.

Using ** turns on word-form matching. In this mode, standard English words can be matched by a single word form. For example, swim** will return documents containing swim, swam, or swum, which are all forms of the search keyword. This tends to not work well with technical terms, though.

Weights

You can affect the ranking of documents based on certain terms. For example, VBScript[100] samples will give extra weight to documents containing the term VBScript. Weight ranges are numeric and run from 0 to 1000. Using weights, you can tell the search engine which terms are more important to you and help it rank the results accordingly.

Site-Type Queries

This is trickier, and we may create an "advanced search" page to simplify this in the future, if folks ask for it. Essentially, you can query documents from a certain type of site. For example:

@ss-type Blog @all Monad

Will return only documents from blog-type Web sites, and only those containing the phrase "Monad." The various possible types are Blog, Tutorial, Reference, and Scripts (indicating a script repository). The @all keyword should be followed by whatever search terms you want to use to narrow down the results, and your search terms can be a complex query using AND, OR, or the other techniques described above. For example:

@ss-type Scripts @all create and user and not perl

Will hunt for documents containing the words create and user, but not containing the word perl. Only sites designated as "script repositories" will be searched.