The search Syntax
| Author: | Admin |
| Title: | Search syntax help |
| Language: | en-US |
| Created: | 23:53 on Wednesday, 01. September 2021 |
| Modified: | 23:53 on Wednesday, 01. September 2021 |
| Keywords: | help, about, search, foo, bar, foobar |
| Excerpt: | Explains the search syntax for the lunr.js search facility. |
| Tags: | help |
| Page layout: | nonav |
Because this site is built with a static page generator, there is no database to search content. We use lunr.js for implementing a local search feature, utilizing a local index built from content, keywords, titles and tags. Please refer to the official documentation for a detailed description for all of the features. Lunr.js is a quite sophisticated search script and supports a lot of advanced features like fuzziness, searching for multiple terms or limiting the search to specific fields only. The technical implementation details for this site are available here.
Lunr.js is MIT-licensed Open Source Software and is designed to respect your privacy rights. Search queries are never submitted to 3rd parties nor are they stored, archived or logged anywhere. Your privacy matters and Lunr.js does not violate it in any way.
Wildcards
The * (asterisk) operator can be used for wildcard search. So, foo* as a search term will also
find foobar. Please note that overusing wild card can degrade search performance and will likely
result in too many hits. Particularly performance critical are wildcards at the beginning of a
search string. Example: *oo (which would find foo or *moo).
Combining multiple keywords
The search always uses all terms present in the search string. A search string foo bar would
search for foo or bar, or both. By default, search terms are combined using a logical OR
operation, but there are ways to change that. For example, you can exclude a search term by
prefixing it with a minus sign. Searching for foo -bar would only find documents that contain
foo but must NOT contain bar. Likewise, you can force a search term by prefixing it with a plus
sign. Example: foo +bar will find documents that include both foo and bar.
Fuzziness
You can specify a level of fuzziness with the ~ (tilde) operator, followed by the desired level of
fuzziness. Searching for foobar~1 will find slightly misspelled versions of foobar, like
fobar. A fuzziness level of 1 or 2 should be sufficient to find most misspelled words. Higher
levels may result in too many matches, degrading your search experience (and possibly also the
performance) significantly.
Searching for a specific field
Use fieldname:term as syntax. For example, searching for title:foo will only search the titles
of the indexed documents. Supported field names are: title, category, keywords, author, excerpt and
tags.
Weighting terms
By default, all search terms in a query are of equal importance. However, the ^ (power) operator can
be used to boost the weight (importance) of a search term. Searching for foo^10 bar will still
find all documents that contain either foo or bar, but those that contain foo will be ranked
factor 10 higher in the list of results and therefore appear nearer to the top of the list.