The Different Types of Search in UQL

Operator

"" (quotation marks)

Purpose

You can get more results than expected is you enter a search phrase (that is, two or more search terms meant to appear together), but do not enclose the phrase with quotation marks.

To search for documents on 2018 sales, typically people would enter: 2018 sales

In this case, the search results would include any document that contains both 2015 and sales, but not necessarily next to each other.

Example

To search for documents containing the exact phrase 2018 sales, use quotation marks: "2018 sales"

Operator

+

Purpose

You can override the matching behavior using the + (plus) operator to search for exact words only. It is typically useful to search for:

• link words (the, a, of, or, and) that are ignored by default,
• the plural of a word.

This operator is useful for building very specific queries.

You can also prepend words by + in your query to search for the exact forms of these words only. For example, with the query foo +bar, foo has the standard semantic expansion (like lemmatization if activated) but not bar, which returns the exact form only (that is, bar).

Operators

OR, AND, NOT, XOR, BOR

Purpose

Searches for documents containing:

• OR: either one search term OR another
• AND: one search term AND another search term
• NOT: one search term BUT NOT another search term
• XOR: either one search term OR another BUT NOT both
• BOR: either one search term OR another. Only use it for a fast OR on many documents (no expansion, no ranking).

Example

Use OR to specify a list of similar terms that may occur in the document you are looking for. (movie star) OR (celebrities) searches for documents containing either movie star or celebrities.

Operators

NOT, -XX, BUTNOT

Purpose

Excludes documents containing a specific word or phrase from the search with a - (minus sign) or a NOT operator before the word to exclude.

Example

new -york OR new NOT york searches for documents containing new but not york.

You can also use the BUTNOT operator:

"Martin Luther" BUTNOT "Martin Luther King" matches if there is at least an instance of Martin Luther not followed by King.

Operators

Use prefix handlers: see the list of prefix handlers defined in Search logics > Query Language.

Purpose

Refine your queries by targeting specific index fields with default prefix handlers like text:, title:, etc.

You can also

• specify aliases for these prefix handlers. For a list of aliases, see that prefix handler’s Alias field, in Search logics > Query Language.
• search by category values
• search numerical fields by a range of values
• define custom prefix handlers to go further than the index field level, and trigger very specific search.

For more details, see Using Prefix Handlers.

Example

Search with a default prefix handler: title:foo searches for foo in document titles.

Search with an alias: for the prefix handler document_file_size, you have the following aliases by default: file_size, imap_mail_file_size, nntp_post_file_size, ldap_record_file_size

Search by category values: categories:fileattributes/extension/PDF

Search a numerical range of values: NumericalPrefixHandler:[100 TO 200]

Custom prefix handler: for a similarity search, we could enter a query like: similar: (ID1, ID2, ID3) where ID1, ID2, ID3 are the IDs of related terms, to search for all the documents having a part or all of these related terms.

Operators

Prefix handler soundslike:

You must create this prefix handler beforehand. For more details, see Using Prefix Handlers.

Purpose

Finds documents using the phonetic spelling of search terms.

Example

To find a coworker with a name that sounds like Brona, enter: soundslike:brona to return results such as Bronagh and Branagh.

Operators

Prefix handler spellslike:

Purpose

Finds documents that do not exactly match the search terms. This is useful if uncertain of the correct spelling, or there are several accepted spellings for a search term.

Example

Searching for spellslike:organise also returns documents containing organize.

Operators

Prefix handlers date:, document_lastmodifieddate:, document_before:, document_after:

Purpose

Retrieves documents based on a given date, or date range.

By default, the input format is detected automatically. If you need to define a custom format, update the Input format field for your prefix handler in Search Logics > Query Language.

What you must know:

• We support the date formats: RFC 822, RFC 850, asctime, ISO 8601, and date format YYYY/MM/DD-HH:MM:SS (DD/MM/YYYY is NOT supported)
• Operators are =, ==, <=, <, >=, >, != and :
• The default timezone is GMT.
• Quotes are required in search queries when there is at least a blank space in the date. For example, myDatePrefixHandler="12/15/2018 15:23:22 GMT+02"

Supported formats

• Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT

RFC 850:

• Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT
• Fri Nov 21 11:18:47 CET 2014

asctime:

• Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994

RFC 822:

• Fri, 21 Nov 2014 16:59:27 MET DST
• Fri, 21 Nov 2014 17:59:14 EET
• Fri, 21 Nov 2014 15:59:16 +0000 (UTC)
• Fri, 21 Nov 2014 16:59:42 MET
• Fri, 21 Nov 2014 15:58:04 +0000 (UTC)
• Fri, 21 Nov 2014 07:58:28 -0800

American date format:

• 12/23/2014 15:23:22
• 12/23/2014 15:23:22 GMT+02
• 09/23/2014 08:52:59 [+00:00]
• 2014/12/23 15:23:22
• 2014/01/23-22:11:37
• 2014/12/23
• 2014/12

ISO 8601 samples (ISO works with / or - separators):

• 2014-03-12 15:23:22
• 2014-03-12
• 2014-03
• 2014
• 2014-12-06T15:31Z
• 2014-12-06T15:31:17+00:00
• Week numbers like 2016-W18-1T09:49:38Z are NOT supported

Example

Let’s say that we give the modidied alias to the document_lastmodifieddate prefix handler. We could have:

• modified="11/23/2018 10:18:02 GMT+01" for a fully explicit date query
• modified="2018/11/23 10:18:02+00:00" for a fully explicit date query
• modified="2018/11/23 10:18:02" for a date query with the default GMT time zone interpreted implicitly.
• modified="11/23/2018 10:18" for a query with an implicit range of 1 minute.
• modified=2018/11/23 for a query with an implicit range of one day.
• modified=2018/11 for a query with an implicit range of 1 month.
• modified=2018 for a query with an implicit range of 1 year.
• modified<"11/23/2018 10:18:02 GMT+01" for all documents before the explicit date.
• modified<"2018/11/23T10:18:02+01:00" for all documents before the explicit date.
• modified<=11/23/2018 for all documents until the end of the 11/23/2014 day.
• modified<=2018 for all documents until the end of the 31/12/2018 day.
• modified:[2014/12/23 TO "2018/01/21-22:11:37 GMT+01"] to search documents in a specific date range. This range notation is inclusive, and works with numerical values too.

We can also restrict a search query according to a document’s last modification or creation date:

• "movie star" AND date >= 2018/05/21 finds documents containing movie star modified after May 21, 2014.
• and "movie star" AND date <= 2018/05/21 finds documents on movie star modified before May 21, 2018.

Operator

Prefix handler file_size:

Purpose

Searches based on file size in bytes.

Example

• file_size:1024 returns documents with a file size of 1 KB.
• file_size>=1024 returns documents with a file size larger than 1 KB.

Operator

Prefix handler language:XX

Purpose

Limits your search to the documents of a specific language using the language:XX prefix handler (where XX can be EN, FR, DE, etc.).

This is useful when you need to search using a term that you can find in many languages, but has different meanings from one language to another.

Example

"Tour de France" language:en searches for English-language documents about the Tour de France.

Operator

Prefix handler inurl:

Purpose

Includes all web pages with URLs containing the search keywords. Unlike site:, this is a full text search of the URL text.

Example

inurl:example returns:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.exalead.com/blog/another_cloudview_example/

Operator

Prefix handler url:

Purpose

Searches for pages with the same normalized URLs.

You do not need to include the leading http://, https://, www., and trailing slashes in the query.

Example

url:example returns:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.exalead.com/blog/another_cloudview_example/

Operator

Prefix handler site:

Purpose

Returns all documents on a site. Only expect results for documents with a publicurl meta, such as those pushed by the Crawler and the Feed Fetcher connectors.

The leading "http://" or "https://" and "www.", and trailing slashes are optional in the query.

Example

site:example.com always returns the same documents as site:http://www.example.com/

Operator

OPT

Purpose

Specifies an optional word to include in the search. Use it to specify several terms without limiting the scope of the search.

Example

cow OPT mad searches for documents containing cow that preferably also include mad.

Operators

NEAR, NEXT, AFTER, BEFORE

Purpose

Find documents where search terms are in proximity of one another. By default the maximum distance between terms is 16 words.

Edit this value using the Search > Search Logics > Query Language > Default distance for proximity operators property.

Example

"movie star" AFTER hollywood searches for documents where movie star appears soon after hollywood.

You can also specify the maximum distance of the words by using NEAR/x, AFTER/x, and BEFORE/x. For example:

• "movie star" NEAR/5 hollywood searches for documents where movie star appears within 5 words of hollywood,
• and "movie star" BEFORE/5 hollywood searches for documents where movie star appears within 5 words before hollywood.

Operator

*

Purpose

Searches using the beginning of a word to find a proper noun using its short form, or its linguistic root.

Example

Jenn* searches for documents containing words starting with Jenn, such as Jennifer, Jennie, Jenni, and Jenna.

Operator

Regular expression patterns based on Perl 5.

You must open and close patterns with a / (slash) character.

Purpose

Searches using the beginning of a word to find a proper noun using its short form, or its linguistic root.

Example

• /s.ren..pi.y/ searches for documents with words that match the pattern S . R EN .. PI . Y and would find documents with the word serendipity.
• /mpg(1|2|3)?/ searches for documents containing any of the following: mpg, mpg1, mpg2, or mpg3.

Operator

Prefix handler geo:

Purpose

See Configuring Geographic Search.

Example

To search within a radius or polygon using UQL, see Search with a Radius or Polygon (UQL).

Operator

INNERJOIN

Purpose

Combine records from two documents whenever there are matching values in a common field.

See More About INNERJOIN.

Operator

SPLIT

Purpose

Searches for words in specific sections of a document.