A guide to understanding Searchify's supported query format

Example dataset

All the examples in this page use an index composed of the following documents:

    documentA = { 
        "text" : "Hello world. I'm the content of the 'text' field. It's 
                  the default field for queries.",
        "city" : "San Francisco, CA",
        "author" : "Java Power Coder"
    } 

    documentB = {
        "text" : "Good morning! The default field of this document contains 'tea'.",
        "city" : "London, UK",
        "author" : "World Class Developer"
    }
    
    documentC = {
        "text" : "Goodbye world. This is the default field of the last document.",
        "city" : "San Diego, CA",
        "author" : "PHP Power Coder"
    }

Basic Queries

There are two types of basic queries: Terms and Phrases. A Term is a single word such as "hello" or "world". For example:

hello

will match:

documentA

and

world

will match:

documentA, documentC

A Phrase is a group of words by double quotes such as "hello world". Documents matching phrase queries will contain the exact phrase.

For example:

"hello world"

will match:

documentA

and

"default field"

will match:

documentA, documentB, documentC

Specifying fields for queries

By default, all basic queries are executed against the text field of the indexed documents. It's possible to select a different field, by prefixing a basic query with a field name.

For example:

author:world

will match:

documentB

and

author:"power coder"

will match:

documentA, documentC

Boolean Operators

You can combine basic queries with Boolean operators to form a more complex query. Boolean operators define the relationships between Terms or Phrases. Searchify supports the following Boolean operators: AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-". Please note that Boolean operators must be all uppercase.

• AND

This is the default operator. It will be used if there is no Boolean operator between two terms. For example:

default document

is the same as

default AND document

and will match:

documentB, documentC

• OR

This operator makes its surrounding terms optional, but at least one must match the document. For example:

hello OR last

will match:

documentA, documentC

• NOT

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term (or phrase) after NOT. For example:

world NOT content

will match:

documentC

and

world NOT "default field"

will match:

documentA

You can use the NOT operator several times in the same query. For example:

world NOT content NOT author:coder

will not match any document.

 # no documents matching 

Precedence

The order in which you enter search terms does not effect your results. AND and OR operators have the same precedence and group from left to right. For example:

hello OR last

is the same as

last OR hello

and will match the same documents,

documentA, documentC

If you need to modify precedence for complex queries, you can use parentheses. For example:

(good AND world) OR author:power

will match:

documentA, documentC

and

good AND (world OR author:power)

will match:

documentC

Field Grouping

You can also use parentheses to specify the field only once.

For example:

author:(world class)

is the same as:

author:world author:class

and will match:

documentB

Term Weights (caret operator)

You can boost terms in a query by appending the caret operator at the end of a term. Example:

author:world^2 OR city:san^10

This will match all documents, and documentC will be the last result.

Wildcard/Prefix queries

You can perform "wildcard" or "prefix" queries using the '*' operator. For example:

text:goo*

This query will match all documents containing words beginning with the prefix 'goo' in the 'text' field. In this example, this query matches documentB and documentC, because documentB contains the word "Good" and documentC contains the word "Goodbye".