A brief note on the possible new search syntax options after our search engine upgrade
EIN members should note that we've upgraded our search engine.
In normal use, you probably won't notice any difference: the search behaves the same and will do everything it did before (the only change is that the amount of words the search can skip in multiple word searches has increased from 1 out of 4 or 25% to 1 out of 5 or 20%).
However, the upgrade now gives you the option to build much more advanced queries.
The first thing to note is that the search now supports full Boolean queries, in addition to the previous + and - operators.
You can now use AND, OR, NOT. For example, a search for Taliban OR Taleban will find either word.
You can also now use brackets to group clauses to form sub queries. For example: (Taliban OR Taleban) AND Pakistan.
Single and multiple character wildcard searches are now supported within single terms. To perform a single character wildcard search use the ? symbol. To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the * symbol. For example, Tal?ban.
We reckon those will be the most useful new features for most users, though, if you are very geeky, http://lucene.apache.org/core/2_9_4/queryparsersyntax.html has more of what is possible.