Overview

Indica provides a rich query language, giving its users a flexible and advanced way to search through large amounts of documents. This manual provides an overview of the syntax that can be used to execute searches.


Terms and phrases

A query is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases.

—   A Single Term is a single word such as "test" or "hello".

—   A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "hello dolly".

Multiple terms can be combined together with Boolean operators to form a more complex query (see below).

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. Indica supports AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-" as Boolean operators(Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS).

OR

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. The symbol || can be used in place of the word OR.

To search for documents that contain either "jakarta apache" or just "jakarta" use the query:

"jakarta apache" jakarta

or

"jakarta apache" OR jakarta

AND

The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND.

To search for documents that contain "jakarta apache" and "Indica search" use the query:

"jakarta apache" AND "Indica search"

Plus (“+”)

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in a field of a single document.

To search for documents that must contain "jakarta" and may contain "indica" use the query:

+jakarta indica

NOT

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT.

To search for documents that contain "jakarta apache" but not "Indica search" use the query:

"jakarta apache" NOT "Indica search"

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results:

NOT "jakarta apache"

Minus (“-“)

The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol.

To search for documents that contain "jakarta apache" but not "Indica search" use the query:

"jakarta apache" -"Indica search"

Grouping

Indica supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a query.

To search for either "jakarta" or "apache" and "website" use the query:

(jakarta OR apache) AND website

This eliminates any confusion and makes sure you that website must exist and either term jakarta or apache may exist.