search/Guide

    June 14th, 2023

      This is a guide to searching on this website. See search/About to learn about search on this website.

      OR AND NOT

      Search terms are treated as an implicit inclusive OR. AND is created by prepending a plus (+). NOT is produced with a minus (-).

      Examples:

      Fields

      You can search across a particular field. Here are the available fields and the search syntax:

      • Available fields:

      • Syntax: field:term

      Examples:

      Exact phrase searching

      Exact phrase searching is made possible through an add-on function and is limited to a single exact search phrase. This search syntax cannot be combined with other search syntax.

      Examples:

      !Bangs

      !Bang () searching is made possible through add-on functions. All available bangs are provided in the search bar by typing an exclamation mark (!) or at search/!Bangs. This is inspired by DuckDuckGo’s use of bangs. Bangs have some similarities to golinks. Bangs open in a new tab.

      Examples:

      • [!browse] opens .
      • [!ddg !bangs] => conducts a search for !bangs on DuckDuckGo (itself a bang).
      • [!w !bang] => conducts a search for [!bang] on Wikipedia (itself redirecting to the Bang section of the encyclopedia’s page on DuckDuckGo).

      Wildcards

      asterisk (*)

      Examples:

      Boosts

      You can ‘boost’ the value of a term in the relevance ranking with a caret (^) followed by a positive integer.

      Examples:

      Compare [search find^10] and [search^10 find]

      sort:

      This can be used with a query (ignoring relevancy ranking and sorting all included results) or by itself (in which case it returns all items in the index, sorted). Currently only chronological sorting is supported. These are flexible operators that support various alternative representations.

      sort:date

      Example: [Berkeley sort:date]

      Permitted representations:

      sort:date-reverse

      Example: [Berkeley sort:date-reverse]

      Permitted representations:

      similar:

      This operator will return the 30 pages determined as “most similar” per embedding similarity (see more at search/About#similarity).

      Example: [similar:https://danielsgriffin.com/changes/2023/07/13/notes.html]

      Note: This operator does not function with other operators or search terms.

      More?

      Here is the official searching guide from Lunr.js: [Lunrjs.com > Guides > Searching]](https://lunrjs.com/guides/searching.html) (for instance, for fuzzy matching, not discussed here).

      Footnotes

      1. Square brackets are used to enclose and indicate the search query, see more at: search/Notation.↩︎