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Query Language

Terrier offers a flexible and powerful query language for searching with phrases, fields, or specifying that terms are required to appear in the retrieved documents. Some examples of queries are the following:

term1 term2 retrieves documents that contains 1 or more term1 and term2 (they need not contain both)
term1^2.3the weight of term1 is boosted 2.3.
+term1 +term2retrieves documents that contain both term1 and term2.
+term1 -term2retrieves documents that contain term1 and do not contain term2.
"term1 term2"retrieves documents where the terms term1 and term2 appear in a phrase.
"term1 term2"~nretrieves documents where the terms term1 and term2 appear within a distance of n blocks. The order of the terms is not considered.

Combinations of the different constructs are possible as well. For example, the query term1 term2 -"term1 term2" would retrieve all the documents that contain at least one of the terms term1 and term2, but not the documents where the phrase "term1 term2" appears.

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