How to Make Your Search More Powerful

TeachEngineering word searches are implemented with the Lucene search engine. In addition to standard word searches, Lucene supports the following search options.

CAUTION: Using these search modifiers can greatly increase the time it takes to return search results.

• Single-Character Wildcard Search

  Use the "?" symbol to match any one character. For instance:

  The search term
  gra?e
  returns results for "grace," "grade," "grape," "graze," and others.

  NOTE: The "?" character cannot be used at the beginning of words.

• Multi-Character Wildcard Search

  Use the "*" symbol to match with zero or more characters. For instance:

  The search term
  engineer*
  returns results for "engineer," "engineered," "engineering," and others.

  The search term
  d*y
  returns results for "day," "daily," "density," "delivery," "discovery," and others.

  NOTE: The "*" character cannot be used at the beginning of words.

• Fuzzy/Similar Search

  We support searching for similarly spelled words using the fuzzy/similar search character, "~". This character always goes at the end of a word.

  The search term
  road~
  returns results for "roads," "load," "loads," "toad," "toads," and others.

• Proximity Search

  You can search for words that must be within a certain distance of each other. After your pair of search term words in quotation marks, use the "~" symbol followed by a number to return results in which the two words are within the specified number of words of each other.

  The search term
  "teach engineering"~15
  returns results in which the word "teach" and the word "engineering" are within 15 words of each other.

• Prohibitive/Exclusion Search

  Use the symbols "-" and "!" to exclude terms from a search. When either symbol is placed before a word, any document containing that word is excluded from the results.

  The search term
  water !bottle
  returns results for documents that contain the word "water," but not the word "bottle."

  The search term
  physics -math
  returns results for documents that contain the word "physics," but not the word "math."