Re: Free text search using disjunctions

[Michael Brunton-Spall]

Hey Filippo,

Sorry for the delay, I missed this email in the deluge of emails.

We use Lucene behind the scenes for free text parsing, you cna find a complete syntax guide at: http://lucene.apache.org/core/old_versioned_docs/versions/3_1_0/queryparsersyntax.html

I believe that doing "fish" or "meat" should work for you, although I'd have to double check how much we trim down your search term before passing it to Lucene.

hope that helps

Michael Brunton-Spall

guardian.co.uk

On Thursday, 26 July 2012 15:01:09 UTC+1, Filippo Tampieri wrote:

I need to use the free text search api to look for documents that contain any one of a sequence of terms; however, if I set the q parameter to more than one term (say q=fish meat) I only get back documents that contain all the terms.

I have tried fish|meat or (fish OR meat), but none of them worked.

Does anyone know what the syntax for the q parameter is?

Thank you

[Michael Brunton-Spall]

Heya Kaspar,

Looking at the code, I think that should work, but given that it doesn't I can only assume that for some reason our search index is assuming that OR is a word, so it's looking for content with the words "berlin", "darmstadt" and "or".

I've tried a number of things locally but can't seem to get the ability to perform an OR query on a text search on the content.

I'm afraid that it therefore looks impossible to do on the content api at the moment.  I'll add it to our backlog of features and keep you updated on the status.

Michael Brunton-Spall
guardian.co.uk

On 27 November 2012 15:35, Kaspar Fischer <kaspar....@dreizak.com> wrote:

Hi everybody,

I can confirm that the NOT operator works, however, OR does not work in my experiments:

  http://explorer.content.guardianapis.com/#/search?q=berlin&format=json&api-key=

has 20886 hits, but http://explorer.content.guardianapis.com/#/search?q=berlin+OR+darmstadt&format=json&api-key= has 27 hits, that is, less hits even though the result set should be larger.

Is there a syntax for OR terms?

Thanks!

Kaspar

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[Marijn Schraagen]

Hi,

Some time has passed since this topic was discussed, are there any developments? Currently the use of search operators is still somewhat unclear. For example, the following query is intended as an AND-query for terms 'arms' and 'treaty':
http://beta.content.guardianapis.com/search?q=arms&q=treaty&order-by=oldest&api-key=xxx
However, the first result is an article from 1873 which contains the term 'treaty' but not the term 'arms':
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1873/mar/12/fromthearchive.zanzibar
Are there any general guidelines on how to use search operators, or an overview of preprocessing steps performed by the API?

Thanks!

On Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:21:28 UTC+1, Kaspar Fischer wrote:

Michael,

thanks for the quick response and the clarification.

I'll follow this post for any updates in the future.

Cheers,

Kaspar

[Michael Hockenhull]

I second the above query - having a lot of trouble figuring out the operators, which don't seem to be behaving according to the Lucene guide any longer. If anyone could clarify it would be a great help!

Cheers!

[Mariot Chauvin]

We don't support properly operators for the moment and this is not currently on our backlog.

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[Michael Hockenhull]

Ah, that's a shame! Thank you very much for your quick response. 

[chris.b...@guardian.co.uk]

Hi everyone,

We've just released support for boolean operators and phrase search. 

You can now search for things like:

* "david beckham"

* obama AND bush

* (obama OR clinton) AND bush

e.g. here's a phrase search for "david beckham":

http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=%22david%20beckham%22&api-key=test

We've also added a section to the documentation(http://open-platform.theguardian.com/documentation/) about this new feature.

Also note that the default operator is OR, so searching for 'fish meat' (without the quotes) would find all articles containing either word.

Please give the new search operators a try and let us know if you have any problems.

Chris