Funnelback query language and search query parameters

This is just a simple sequence of words entered into the search box.

Search for exact matches to a phrase by enclosing the words in double quotes. The phrase is treated as a single search term.

Answers to this query will contain the exact phrase "hail caesar". No partial matches will occur.

By default, Funnelback must be given some search terms in order to return some search results.

However, there is a plugin that can be enabled that allows empty searches to be submitted. When enabled, an empty search will return all results but the plugin can also be configured to run a default search query.

Documents may contain metadata, including the document’s author, title and when it was created. Funnelback can query this information using the syntax:

where class is the metadata class as defined in the search configuration.

The query:

locates documents containing the word barcelona within city metadata class.

To search for results that have word1 OR word2 enclose the words inside square brackets.

Exclude any search results that contain a specific word by prefixing it with a dash/minus character.

Exclude any search results that contain a specific word from fully matching results only by prefixing it with an exclamation mark character.

Ensure a word is included in all results by prefixing it with a plus character.

Advanced scoping operators can be used to filter down the result set before a search is run. This allows you to run a search (with partial matches) on a part of overall search index.

Search for words that appear close to other words by enclosing the words in back quotes or backticks. The phrase is treated as a single search term.

Results will include the words, in any order, within 15 words of each other.

The up-weight operator (tilde) will increase the score of documents that match the element without making this element a constraint. For example:

The influence of the upweighting can be set by appending a number between 0 and 1 using a carat operator. For example:

will push up results with the word concurrency more than

Date queries constrain the result set to documents that were modified/created during a specified time period. For date querying purposes, Funnelback only records one date per document. The value for this is determined when the document is index and follows the date precedence order.

This returns documents that were modified/created on the 1st of January 1600.

This returns documents that were modified/created on or before the 1st of January 1600.

This returns documents that were modified/created before the 1st of January 1600.

This returns documents that were modified/created after the 1st of January 1600.

This returns documents that were modified/created on or after the 1st of January 1600.

By default Funnelback stems words in both the query and in the index. This means that searching for economic will also match economics.

This behavior can be cancelled for specific words by appending a hash character to the end of the word.

When stemming is enabled (this is the default) adding a hash character will ensure that stemming is disabled for the word.

Searching for

will ensure that the word economic is not stemmed (so you won’t receive matches in the results for economics).

When stemming is disabled in the query processor options (stem=0), adding a hash character to a word will enable stemming for the specific word.

Searching for

will match:

Limited wildcard searching is supported when the query language - wildcard (truncation) support plugin is enabled.

The plugin supports searching for words that start with a particular string.

This example pattern matches all pages containing words starting with anti, such as antium and antioch.

When using the plugin, the truncation operator (*) can only appear at the right of the string and can only be used to find words that start with the string. It does not support words that end in the string (as was supported in the legacy wildcard searching).

When the social tags plugin is enabled, the following additional query language operators are supported:

Preceding a term with the hash (#) operator matches hash-tags. e.g. search for occurrences of the #funnelback hash-tag:

Preceding a term with an at symbol (@) matches user mentions. e.g. search for occurrences of the @jsmith user:

When result collapsing (grouping) is configured you will see a special operator ?= appear within the Funnelback JSON responses that applies the result collapsing to the query.

The operator is ?= followed by a string of letters and numbers (the result collapsing signature). e.g.

The different types of queries above can be mixed and matched to get your desired outcome.

For example, the query:

mixes the following operators:

The following list of CGI paramaeters are available to faciliate advanced search forms. Values passed via these special parameters are translated into the Funnelback query language.

e.g. passing in a CGI parameter query_prox=romeo+juliet will result in the following being appended to the query that is processed: `romeo juliet` which runs a query that looks for the word romeo near the word juliet.

The full list of query parameters is:

Note: query will accept a set of words that are specified in the query language. For example you could pass in query=-economics course which would search for anything that included the word course but not the word economics. This would be equivalent to supplying query=course&query_not=economics

Funnelback includes a number of query language and CGI parameters that can be used to search a text type metadata field

A number of geospatial CGI parameters are available when searching geospatial metadata. These parameters can be used to scope the search to items with a geospatial coordinate within a specific distance of an origin point.

This allows for a show results near me search when used in conjunction with a user’s GPS or browser-derived location coordinates.

Geospatial metadata can also be sorted by proximity to the origin point by using the sort=prox or sort=dprox parameters. See: sort options for more information on sorting search results.