Understanding full-text search expressions

Ad Annihilator features full-text search capabilities when searching for documents and resources in Ad Annihilator cache. This turns your browser into your own offline search engine. This is useful for searching of documents by their content when you do not remember or know their addresses or other characteristics. Search for documents and resources can be performed in Search tab.

Full-text search syntax may be quite complex. Fortunately, Ad Annihilator supports both simple and advanced syntaxes for beginning and advanced users respectively.

Simple full-text search syntax

This syntax is simple as its name suggests. Just enter the words the documents should contain separating them with spaces and that's all! For example, to search for documents containing words "key" and "lock" enter "key lock" (without quotes). This will search for documents that contain these words in any place of the documents regardless of how far they stand from each other.

To search for contiguous words (phrase) enclose them in quotes. For example, to find the phrase "Mary loves cats" enter "Mary loves cats" (altogether with quotes). You may combine both quoted phrases and single words to get more complex search conditions. For instance, to find the documents containing the phrase exampled above altogether with the word "lamb" anywhere else in that document enter "Mary loves cats" lamb (with quotes).

You may enter not only words but their masks as well. For example, to search for documents containing words that start with "col", such as colonel, colon, column, etc., enter "col*".  See Understanding masks for more information on masks and their syntax.

Note that ALL specified words must be present in the document in order to be found. To find documents containing ANY of the words, use advanced syntax with OR operator.

Single-character words and symbols are not accepted in the search expression.

Advanced full-text search syntax

Advanced full-text search syntax allows you to perform advanced search for documents by their content. Advanced full-text search expression is a logical expression that specifies which words and in which combinations a document should contain. An expression may contain words or their masks, logical operators and brackets. All what is said about words for simple full-text search syntax is true for advanced syntax as well.

There are three operators that may appear in expressions:

• AND - specifies that BOTH words to the left and right of this operator should appear in the documents;

• OR - specifies that ANY of the words to the left and right of this operator should appear in the documents;

• NOT - specifies that the word to the right of this operator must NOT be present in the documents.

AND and OR operators must have a word or a subexpression to the left and right of it while NOT require a word or a subexpression to the right only. A subexpression is an expression built with these operators enclosed in brackets if needed. The NOT operator takes priority over other operators while AND operator takes priority  over the OR operator. Use brackets to change this priority rules and make OR operator have priority over AND and NOT or AND over NOT.

Examples:

• lock AND key - searches for documents containing both words "lock" and "key";

• lock OR key - searches for documents containing either word "lock" or "key" or both;

• lock AND key OR door - searches for documents containing both words "lock" and "key" or word "door". AND operator takes precedence over OR here;

• lock AND (key OR door) - searches for documents containing word "lock" and either word "key" or "door" or both. We use brackets to enhance the priority of OR over AND;

• tab* OR *tab - searches for documents containing words either starting or ending with "tab" or both;

• NOT Internet - searches for documents that do not contain word "Internet";

• hardware AND NOT computer  - searches for documents that contain "hardware" but do not contain  "computer".