General

By default the search is performed in all Forums. The characters of a Search word are the standard character sets (a … z, 0 … 9) and a selection of special characters defined in the config file (see below). Word separators are e.g. " " (space),  ".",  ";",  "_",  ":",  "<",  ">"

When searching for a phrase, enclose it with "…" (quotes) or ‘…‘ (single quotes).

The query is case-insensitive; wildcard (*) termination is available, it can only be used at the end of the word. Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT can be used. The search term is processed from left to right; parentheses can be used to force the order.

Examples

doc

retrieves "doc" and "Doc" but not "document"

doc*

retrieves "doc" and "Document"

muon "and" doc

retrieves all pages which contain   "muon"  or   "and"  or   "doc"   in any order

solar or sun

retrieves all pages which contain   "solar"  or   "sun"   in any order

juliet not (ophelia and pac)

retrieves postings with "juliet" that do not contain both words "ophelia" and "pac"

Restricted search and order of displayed issues.

Various choices are available to restrict the search. This is useful to speed up the search and limit the number of issues displayed. You can in addition choose the order in which the found issues are displayed:

Subject/Body

This is the most common search, which looks both at the subject line and the text of the posting.

URL

Specify a directory in the path to the posting. Example: Search for "get" will find all postings.

Author of message ("From" and "Full Name")

"From" takes as input the name of the sender, i.e. the part of the e-mail address before the @ sign. "Full Name" accepts each of the separately listed names of the sender. The sender is not required to be a registered HN member.

Forum

This uses the "short" name of the Forum, i.e. the name which appears after "/get/" in the URL's of postings to the Forum. It is planned to simplify the restriction to Forums.

Choice of time window

Various fixed time windows, or the range of start and end date can be selected. The date and time are based on the local time zone of the HyperNews server. Thus the server's "Today" may be a few hours different from your local "Today".

Order in which the postings are shown

Ranking is calculated using a special algorithm, see FAQ ranking (for a lot of details).

More details on search terms

See

Swish-e Searching Instructions

Swish-e Configuration file config.h (ask the HN administrators to give you a copy, if you want to dig so deep).

Features which presently do not work

The search relies on indexing. There is still an issue with non 7-bit characters for which the search indices are currently broken (under investigation).