Search

Awasu's advanced search engine helps you find the information you are looking for.

Simply type in what you are looking for and where you want to search for it. The syntax for search queries is described below.

You can also control how feed items will be presented in the results page:

• All
  Each feed item will be shown in its entirety.
• Excerpt
  A brief excerpt of each feed item will be shown.
• Plain text
  A plain-text version of each feed item will be shown.
• None
  No feed item content will be shown (only links).

Simple searches

To do a simple search, make sure the Enable advanced syntax checkbox is cleared and type in one or more words you want to look for. Awasu will locate feed items that contain any of these words (i.e. it will do a boolean OR search).

Advanced search queries

For more advanced search queries, first turn on Advanced syntax.

You can search for words or phrases (enclosed in double quotes), optionally joined together using the boolean keywords OR, AND, NOT (which must be in capitals). If no boolean operator is specified, OR is assumed. Also, words and phrases may be preceeded by a plus/minus sign to indicate that they must or must not appear in documents.

Examples:

• Hello world (searches for documents that contain "hello" or "world")
• "Hello world" AND foobar (searches for documents that contain both "hello world" and "foobar")
• Hello +world (searches for documents that must contain "world" and optionally "hello")

Words and phrases can also be grouped by enclosing them in parentheses.

The following characters are reserved for special functions in search queries:
    + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \
If you want to search for these characters, they must be escaped by preceding them with a backslash.

Using wildcards

You can use ? to represent a single character or * for 0 or more characters.

Examples:

• te?t (matches "test" and "text" and "tent")
• quick* (matches any word that starts with "quick" e.g. quickly, quicker, quicken, etc.)

You cannot use * nor ? as the first character of a search query.

Really advanced features

Words or phrases can be marked as being more important by appending a ^ followed by the boost factor. This is a number that indicates how important the word or phrase is to the query. By default, each word or phrase is given a boost factor of 1 but you can change this for each one. Values must be greater than 0 but can be less than 1 (to indicate less important terms). For example: "hello world"^2 foobar^0.5.

Proximty searches can find words that are near each other. Append a ~ to the end of a phrase followed by the range in words. For example, "foo bar"~10 finds documents that contain the words "foo" and "bar" within 10 words of each other.

You can also do fuzzy searches by appending a ~ to the end of a single word (not phrase). For example, "roam~" will match words like "foam" and "roams".