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 term1 or term2 (they need not contain both) |
| {term1 term2} | retrieves documents that contains term1 or term2, where they are treated as synonyms of each other (they need not contain both) |
| term1^2.3 | the weight of term1 is multiplied 2.3. |
| +term1 +term2 | retrieves documents that contain both term1 and term2. |
| +term1 -term2 | retrieves documents that contain term1 and do not contain term2. |
| title:term1 | retrieves documents that contain term1 in the title field (Field indexing must be configured to record the title field). |
| title:(term1 term2) | retrieves documents that contain term1 or term2 in the title field (Field indexing must be configured to record the title field). |
| term1 -title:term2 | retrieves documents that contain term1, but must not contain term2 in the title field. |
| "term1 term2" | retrieves documents where the terms term1 and term2 appear in a phrase. |
| "term1 term2"~n | retrieves 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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