How to Make Your Search More Powerful

TeachEngineering word searches are implemented with the Lucene search engine. In addition to standard word searches Lucene supports the following search options.

CAUTION: Using these search modifiers can greatly increase the time it will take to return search results.

• Single-Character Wildcard Search

  The "?" symbol will match any one character. For instance:

  The search term
  gra?e
  will return results for "grace", "grade", "grape", "graze", and others.

  NOTE: The "?" character cannot be used at the beginning of words.

• Multi-Character Wildcard Search

  The "*" symbol will match with zero or more characters. For instance:

  The search term
  engineer*
  will return results for "engineer", "engineered", "engineering", and others.

  The search term
  d*y
  will return results for "day", "daily", "density", "delivery", "discovery", and others.

  NOTE: The "*" character cannot be used at the beginning of words.

• Fuzzy/Similar Search

  We support searching for similarly spelled words using the fuzzy/similar search character, "~". This character always goes at the end of a word.

  The search term
  road~
  will return results for "roads", "load", "loads", "toad", "toads" and others.

• Proximity Search

  You can search for words that must be within a certain distance of each other. Including the "~" symbol followed by a number at the end of a pair of words will return results where the two words are within the specified number of words of each other.

  The search term
  "teach engineering"~15
  will return results where the word "teach" and the word "engineering" are within fifteen words of each other.

• Prohibitive/Exclusion Search

  The symbols "-" and "!" both exclude terms from a search. When either symbol is placed before a word, any documents containing that word will be excluded from the results.

  The search term
  water !bottle
  will return results for documents that contain the word "water", but not the word "bottle".

  The search term
  physics -math
  will return results for documents that contain the word "physics", but not the word "math".