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Query Syntax

This page gives an overview of the available query syntax.

Searching is case-insensitive

The Truth Search Tool does not distinguish between lowercase and uppercase characters, so it doesn't matter if the words you enter are completely lowercase, or completely uppercase, or a mix of both. The only exceptions are the keywords OR, AND, NOT and TO, which must always be entered in uppercase. (For the TO keyword, see the 'range searches' section below.)

Proximity Searches

Proximity searches allow you to find words that are within a specific distance away from each other. To do a proximity search, put a tilde ('~') at the end of a phrase, followed by a distance value. — Note that this is syntactically similar to fuzzy searches. For example, to search for documents containing faith and justification within 10 words of each other, type in: "faith justification"~10

Phrase Searches and Required Terms

To search for a phrase (i.e. a sequence of words), put the phrase in double quotes. To indicate that the documents to search for must contain a particular word, put a '+' in front of the word. Of course you can combine these constructs with boolean operators and parentheses. Again, some examples:

Query Resulting documents contain...
"times of restitution" the words times, of and restitution, in that particular order
+household faith definitely household, and maybe also faith
"new creature" AND christ the phrase new creature, and the word christ
+parousia +epiphania (equivalent to the query parousia AND epiphania)

Wildcards

Question marks ('?') and asterisks ('*') can be used to indicate that some characters are unknown. The question mark stands for exactly one unknown character, while the asterisk stands for zero or more unknown characters. Examples:

Query Resulting documents contain...
luc? lucy, luca, ...
luc* luc, lucy, luck, lucene, ...
*ene* lucene, energy, generator, ...

Note: If wildcards are used as the first character of a word, the search tends to be slower on average. This is due to how the index is structured: It's as if you tried to look up someone's phone number, and you only know that person's first name. So, in the example above, searching for *ene* will probably be slower than the other searches because *ene* starts with a wildcard.

Boolean Operators

The Truth Search Tool supports the boolean operators OR, AND and NOT. If words are concatenated without boolean operators, The Truth Search Tool will by default treat them as if they were concatenated with OR. If you don't like that, you can go to the preferences and set AND as the default.

Instead of OR, AND and NOT, you can also use ||, && and '-' (minus symbol), respectively. You can use parentheses to group certain expressions. Here are some examples:

Query Resulting documents contain...
dog OR cat either dog, or cat, or both
dog AND cat both dog and cat
dog cat (by default equivalent to the query dog OR cat)
dog NOT cat dog, but not cat
-dog cat cat, but not dog
(dog OR cat) AND mouse mouse, and either dog or cat, or both

Fuzzy Searches

Fuzzy searches allow you to search for words similar to a given word. For example, if you search for roam~, the Truth Search Tool will find documents containing words like foam and roams.

Additionally, you can append a similarity threshold between 0 and 1, like so: roam~0.8. The higher the threshold, the higher the similarity of the returned matches. Leaving out the threshold is the same as using the default value of 0.5.

Range Searches

The Truth Search Tool allows searching for words that are lexicographically between two other words. For example, the word beta lies between alpha and gamma. So, if you want to list all documents that contain words between alpha and gamma, type in: [alpha TO gamma].

When using the square brackets, the range query is inclusive, i.e. alpha and gamma are included in the results. To do an exclusive range search, use curly brackets instead: {alpha TO gamma}