Search

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

Open the Find dialog from the Edit menu. Then simply type in what you are looking for and where you want to search.

You can control how feed item content 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 (i.e. only item links will be shown).

You can also set up search agents to watch for and flag things of interest, or search channels that let you monitor the results of a search as a feed.

Simple searches

To do a simple search, make sure the Enable advanced syntax checkbox is un-ticked.

Type in one or more words you want to look for and 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 make sure Enable advanced syntax is ticked.

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.

Words and phrases may also be preceded by a plus/minus sign to indicate that they must or must not appear in documents.

For example:

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.

For example:

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.

Proximity 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".